Sorry Folks, It's Coming Up Roses

If the ball looked like that, even Truman could be a quarterback.

Hey all, Kristin here, that special friend of Hairguy's who got lost in the tumble of horrible ex's and important college football games. The grand irony is that I'm here to announce that Truman will be unable to amuse you with his dashing wit and self deprecation this week due to the necessity of music being played by people in classy uniforms at the Rose Bowl.

Just look for him on TV Friday around 1:30 PST and try not to have a conniption without your Wednesday hit of blogasm.

Oh, and Go Ducks.

Conquering Boredom

Entertainment.

Part of what’s so exciting about diving headfirst into 2010 is the fact that we’re finally getting into the decade wherein a lot of the lame Tom Clancy novels I read during middle school were set, giving me the ability to laugh at their outlandish predictions of what human technology would be able to accomplish in the course of 20 years. One series in particular, Tom Clancy’s Net Force, tracked the efforts of an elite team of federal agents who patrolled the Internet in the 2010s, which by that point is accessible by a full body virtual reality hookup that rendered the Internet as a vast three dimensional expanse through which users would wander, gathering information as they did.

Today, Firefox choked trying to load Wikipedia.

It’s been a pretty crazy decade. For the past ten years, everything has been getting smaller and faster* to the point that games which in 2000 required all the power a Nintendo 64 could muster now can fit on a handheld device so small you could hide it inside your own ass and probably forget it was even there. To that end, I feel as though 2000-2009 could be considered “The Decade Of Conquering Boredom.”

*There’s a sex joke here, waiting to be found.

Don’t get me wrong – even in the year 2000 it was sort of irresponsible to live in America and suggest that you were bored at any given time. One of the most profitable industries in America is the one that exists to try to and keep us from being bored. For example, turn on your TV right now and start flipping through the channels – sooner or later you’re going to see an episode of COPS. At that point, it’s a scientific fact that you won’t be bored for between one and 22 minutes.

However, while at the time boredom had been conquered in the home, the fact was that millions of people spent entire minutes of their day without anything to occupy their minds – riding the bus, walking to school, driving – and needed something to stave off the inevitable horror of being alone with their own thoughts. A GameBoy alone would not cut it – not anymore, at least.

So along came the iPod and wireless Internet and cell phones that played video games and phones inside iPods and now here we are. The shining light of entertainment has taken great steps to cleanse the land of actual, certifiable solitude. I mean, who just sits in a park and watches people walk by anymore? Only hobos and pedophiles, both of whom probably have all kinds of entertaining things going on inside their heads without an iPhone’s assistance.

While this propagation of tiny entertainment technology has been great for most people, the real victims here are men. Yes, men. Please, allow me to explain.

In the 1996 film Swingers, Jon Favreau (when he was thin) is at a bar with his friend Vince Vaughn (when he was thin), trying to get over his ex girlfriend. Having had his confidence bolstered by his friends over the last 80 minutes or so, Favreau is ready to get back into the dating world, and looking around the bar, he sees this:

Not a great picture. Just rent the damn movie. Blu-Ray.

Now, if you’re looking to meet somebody in a bar and you see Heather Graham, and she’s not already sticking her tongue down some ex-JV football star’s throat, you’re having an incredibly lucky day. Hell, even if you see Heather Graham and she is making out with some other guy, I’d still recommend buying a lottery ticket – I mean, c’mon, it’s Heather Graham. All I’m saying is, while I haven’t been to a lot of bars, I’ve been to enough to know that Heather Graham is not the sort of person you’d expect to see in one.

She’s all alone, they make eye contact, he goes over to her, there’s some swingdancing, Vince Vaughn makes an asshole of himself, and Favreau gets her number. It’s a happy ending – like any ending that involves Heather Graham.

This scene, more than NHL Hockey ’94 and the fact that swingdancing was cool, definitively makes Swingers dated. Still a great movie, yes, but dated.

In 2009, if by some fantastic coincidence a lovely specimen of womanhood such as Heather Graham were sitting at a bar without at least three men clinging to her like horny barnacles, she would not be just staring at her cocktail, all but inviting Jon Favreau to come over and entertain her. No, she’d have her cell phone out, and she’d be texting one of her friends, or playing a game, or checking her email. She’d be reaching out through social networking in search of something more entertaining than her current surroundings, and putting away her phone in favor of Jon Favreau, who at his best wasn’t especially good looking anyway, would probably seem like a drag.

Boredom is the building block of how people meet. Our cell phones and iPods, while trying to keep us entertained, deprive us of the desperate need to talk to somebody for lack of anything better to do – in essence, they give us something better to do. When choosing between meeting new people or texting the ones we already know, it’s pretty much a given which one somebody is going to choose.

Two and a half years ago, I was sitting in a waiting room in the journalism school with several other people, preparing to audition for the student public access TV station. It was highly boring in there. Sitting next to me was a guy in 15-year-old red and black striped sweatpants, a 1995 Rose Bowl sweatshirt, and a jean jacket who smelled profusely of cigarettes. I thought for all the world that he was a hobo or a male prostitute who had wandered onto campus in a coked up stupor, and wished that I’d brought my iPod so I could pretend to be busy in case he tried to talk to me.

When, inevitably, he did, I wound up getting to know Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes, and one public access TV show later we’re looking for a nice little fixer-upper somewhere in Vermont. He’s no Heather Graham, but I think you get the point.

Truman Capps admits that, in spite of all this, he wouldn’t turn up his nose at an iPhone if Apple makes a deal with Verizon.

Commercials I Would Like To Live In

Ugh, Pepsi. Gross.

God, I wish my life was more like a cold medicine commercial.

Not the whole commercial, mind you – because the first half is usually pretty bad. People are dramatically sneezing at the office or in the street or at a football game (“GO STATE!”) and looking miserable. Their friends either regard them with a mixture of concern and embarrassment or just outright ignore them, already severing the emotional ties once it becomes clear that their acquaintance has become ridden with disease and will die shortly.

But the second half of a cold medicine commercial? High times, friend. People are laughing and frolicking, swingdancing, cheering for State*, and just having the best old time. Beggars are walking and blind men are seeing, all thanks to cold medicine. The only thing keeping them from going out and enjoying the bejeezus out of life was the lack of Sudafed in their bloodstream, and now, in those precious few hours before it makes them fall asleep, they’re going to have so much fun.

*We’ve seen a lot about State’s football program on AllState and Delsym commercials, but I feel like their academics lag significantly behind as I’ve never seen a commercial where somebody sneezes while graduating from State.

If I couldn’t get a cold commercial, I suppose the next best thing would be a commercial for the Snuggie or some similar product. Things start out pretty rough for the people in those commercials too, but their fortunes start to turn around as soon as they purchase a machine that squirts out exactly the right amount of toothpaste every time, or a ladder that is in some way superior to all other store bought ladders. At that point, they start dressing better, they smile, and their world stops being black and white (also, the music changes to upbeat synth-pop instead of “Werp-werrrrrp” every time something goes wrong).

When I’m fantasizing about a successful career, I’d like to be in a commercial for an online or privately owned community college, because according to those commercials, only the most attractive and successful people received their associate’s degree in personal time management from these schools. Everyone in these commercials is motivated and driven to get their life on track, right on down to the beautiful girl in tight shorts and an oversized T-shirt who explains that she goes to class in her pajamas every day because she goes to online college.

I would not want to live in a commercial for an actual college, because those commercials tend to play up symbolism and sentimentality rather than stressing how successful their graduates are – after all, they are actual, real colleges. That’s really all they need to say:

“The University of Oregon – tuition keeps going up, but it’s also a real college. PS – Do you like football?”

Some people argue that it would be more fun to live in a beer commercial, thanks to the abundance of sports stars, scantly clad women, and beer. Also, nobody in a beer commercial is ever truly sad – at the very worst, everyone is lounging around sweating through their shirts on a super hot day, bereft of beer. But even then that unhappiness doesn’t last long, because eventually a gigantic train smashes through the wall, followed by snow and classic rock, and then everybody is drinking ice cold beer in the snow in swimsuits without being too cold.

The way I see it, though, that’s all people in beer commercials do. They just party nonstop with beautiful women. And sure, a never ending party with free beer and all your best friends and hot women may be fun for the first few decades, but eventually even the rowdiest of individuals get all partied out. Sometimes a man just wants to sit in the dark and play video games, and that never happens on a beer commercial. Nobody ever sleeps on a beer commercial – or, if they do, it’s as part of a prank, and when they wake up they’ve got dongs drawn all over their face.

On cold medicine commercials, people are just kicking back and enjoying the simple pleasures. Yeah, the women are beautiful, but they’re not quite as easy as the beer commercial girls. Yeah, guys are having a good time together, but they’re having a really restrained, responsible good time. Sure it may not look as glamorous, but I think that in the long run it’s a much wiser choice. It’s the sort of life that I’ll want to live forever, not just in my twenties.

Most importantly, though, people in cold medicine commercials are in a better position to enjoy their newfound happiness because they’ve actually experienced the misfortune of disease. In a beer commercial, people are so happy that they don’t know how lucky they are; cold medicine people know true suffering, and their happiness is that much sweeter for it.

Hell, though, is living in a HeadOn commercial – much like watching one is also hell.

Truman Capps is applied directly to the forehead.

With Regard To Anal Sex And Christmas

Heartwarming. Subtle. Good. Not the movie we watched last night.

Dear Mom,

I just wanted to let you know again how sorry I am that I rented Bad Santa last night. I had thought that it would be fun to mix up our standard Christmas movie watching ritual by renting a well-regarded movie that we’d never seen before and knew nothing about.

Thus, I was not aware that in the course of the movie Billy-Bob Thornton has graphic anal sex with a lady. This was something that we all found out at the same time, together.

I guess Bad Santa seemed like a really good idea at the time, and then, like most ideas which turn out to involve anal sex in some way, wound up being a bad idea.

For everybody else who’s reading this, Mom, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to explain some of the background:

My family has one enduring holiday tradition: the movies. We are admittedly a family of movie nuts and always have been – I’ve seen video of my parents at parties before I was born absolutely kicking their friends’ asses at movie trivia, and now I’m like their superhero movie trivia offspring, and I guess when our powers unite we form a gigantic VCR and fight Communist librarians in space or something like that.

The movies we watch, every year, in roughly the same order, are:

1) Love Actually
The most recent addition to the list, my parents saw Love Actually a few years back thanks to Netflix and fell in love with this clever, orgiastic, schmaltzy salute to love and Christmas and watch it three or four times every Christmas season. This usually comes first in the rotation because the movie begins five weeks before Christmas, and that sort of thing matters around the Capps household.

2) Scrooged
You may have seen this movie on TV because apparently you can get the broadcast rights for a nickel and a corndog, and around this time of year AMC is always looking for something cheap they can throw on until Mad Men comes back. We’re all Bill Murray fans, so several years ago we found the DVD in a bargain bin and added it to the rotation.

3) A Christmas Carol
This is when you know it’s serious. When we throw on A Christmas Carol, we’ve got about five days left until Jesus’s birthday. This, by the way, is not the dull as hell black and white 1951 version that everybody waxes poetical about, but instead a 1984 made-for-TV movie starring George C. Scott.

4) A Christmas Story
I double dog dare you. I can’t put my arms down. How do the little piggies eat. Bumpuses.

5) It’s A Wonderful Life
Christmas Eve. Every year. This movie is a national treasure and if you disagree I will personally kick your ass.

My family doesn’t have religion to pull us all into the same room at this most auspicious time of the year, so we’ve turned to the same thing that we’ve always shared – sitting around watching movies. And that’s great. It’s part of Christmas. But this year, I wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit.

We watched Love Actually a couple of nights ago (it was already my parents’ second time watching it this month, and they’ve seen it so many times in total that it’s like The Rocky Horror Picture Show to them) and for some reason it just didn’t work for me this time around. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s the mileage, maybe it’s my decidedly less than cheery experiences with love over the past year, but I found a good chunk of the movie to be almost sickeningly heartwarming. It’s all the most overbearing sentiments of Christmas smashed into all the most overbearing sentiments of Valentine’s Day, and while it hadn’t bothered me in the past, this year it was like getting blasted in the face with a shotgun filled with happiness.*

*This may sound like a good thing, but I know from experience that it’s never good to be blasted in the face with a shotgun filled with anything.

Yesterday afternoon I knew that Scrooged was our movie for the evening, and I knew what was in store – Bill Murray is an asshole (a bigger asshole than he is in Kingpin but not as big an asshole as he is in Groundhog Day) who has a variety of encounters with colorful ghosts until he realizes the true meaning of Christmas and does a 15 minute long monologue to a bunch of TV cameras about how super Christmas is, culminating in caroling and a rushing tidal wave of heartwarming.

Don’t get me wrong; I think heartwarming is great. But I think all things should be done in moderation. Lots of great movies are heartwarming - Rushmore, Boogie Nights, The Room - but they do so in such a way as not to beat you over the head with it. They’re subtle. At Christmas, however, the law of subtlety does not seem to be in effect.

I realized that I could not take it – not last night, at least – and endeavored to make a change. I had to spice up our viewing schedule in hopes of not completely burning out my ability to feel by the time we got to the jewel in the holiday movie crown, It’s A Wonderful Life.

“Hey!” I said to my parents over dinner. “Why do we always watch the same old movies at Christmas? Maybe we should try something new!”

My parents looked at one another as though I’d requested an autographed copy of Going Rogue for Christmas.

“Well,” Dad said, after a pause. “What did you have in mind?”

Here he had caught me off guard – I had mostly expected them to stone me for blasphemy and was not thinking this far ahead. I suggested that we defer to our friend The Internet, and after looking up a list of the 25 best Christmas movies, we decided on Bad Santa, a movie none of us had seen or knew much about, because it was a departure from the norm and we all liked Billy-Bob Thornton.

I ran to the video store and picked it up. On the way back, I realized that if what I expected to be a quirky, slightly risqué comedy was a big hit with the parents, this could be my big break. I could steer our holiday choices away from the mind-numbingly heartwarming and into subtler, more avant garde territory.

And then we threw on Bad Santa, and within the first five minutes Billy-Bob Thornton had vomited, wet his pants, and angrily cussed out enough children to fill two school buses.

This has to end soon. I thought to myself, watching the titular Bad Santa be thoroughly unlikeable for fifteen, then twenty, then twenty five, then thirty minutes. Somewhere in there, Billy-Bob bones a girl in his car while she yells “Fuck me, Santa!”

This guy has to start redeeming himself eventually. I assured myself. I mean, they said this was the 19th best Christmas movie of all time. This guy can’t just be a wang the whole time, right?

And right as I thought that, the Bad Santa had anal sex with a fat woman in a department store dressing room while John Ritter watched.

I don’t know your opinion on anal sex, dear readers – I don’t know if you’re into that or not, and either way it’s fine with me because we’re all into weird things. I mean, I like Battlestar Galactica, maybe you like anal sex. That’s cool. I’m not judging – it’s Christmas. But I’ll tell something about anal sex – like it or not, it’s not the sort of thing you want to acknowledge the existence of when you’re sitting next to your mother.

God bless my mother, because she’s a wonderful woman and she’s told some of the dirtiest jokes I’ve ever heard. Some of them have even been about anal sex. But it’s a whole new sack of potatoes to be sitting there with your mother watching people have anal sex. When you’re just talking about it and not watching it, anal sex is all conceptual. You can laugh and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Now, though, I can hear her thinking:

“Oh, my. This movie was popular with my son’s generation – are they into this sort of thing? Is… Is he into this sort of thing? Good heavens!

And no, Mom, I’m not into that sort of thing, although I’ve found out that a lot of people are. Anal has gained a lot of social acceptance recently – it’s not just for gay men anymore, I guess.

I’m as shocked by all of this as you are, Mom.

And I know that all three of us agreed on Bad Santa, and so maybe we’re all a little at fault, but honestly, when you think about it, if I hadn’t gotten a bug up my ass about heartwarming movies in the first place we could have avoided this whole unfortunate incident.

I’m sorry that my misguided need for variety resulted in me bringing anal sex to our house, Mom. I can’t promise you that this will never happen again, but with God as my witness I’ll do my best to prevent it.

What I’ve learned from all of this, Mom, is that while it can be a little sickening when movies are aggressively heartwarming, the alternative is far, far worse. And really, Christmas itself is a sickeningly heartwarming holiday – the movies are only keeping pace, and given all the subtlety with which we approach heartwarming themes throughout the rest of the year, maybe now is the best time to get it out in the open.

And by God, after seeing the festering turd of a movie that was Bad Santa, some heartwarming, mainstream stuff like Scrooged would really hit the spot right about now. All with those Christmas carols…

Look, anyway, I just wanted to apologize again, and let you know that I hope we can make it through the rest of our holiday movies without having to watch any more kinky sex acts together.

Merry Christmas, everybody. God bless.

Love,
Truman

Truman Capps is eagerly anticipating all the hits he's going to get from people Googling "ANAL SEX MOM LOVE".

Back To Basics

What's up, four years of my life? How you doin'?

As of the 15th, Amazon declared my original order of Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition officially lost, and the good natured and helpful people at Amazon customer service (all of whom have long and completely unpronounceable names, as per Indian tradition*) have done a great job of getting me a new one – no sarcasm. They had me re-order the game with a much faster shipping option, then waived the cost and held onto my original, much lower Black Friday payment.

*Here’s an ironic sidenote: Fallout 3 was not released in India because the game contains mutated cows called Brahmin, which is the same name applied to a class of Indian religious scholars, as well as the fact that cows are considered holy in Hindu culture. Basically, imagine if there was a video game in which you could interact with wandering naked mutant Jesuses with stark erections, and their name was “The Holocaust Was Greatly Exaggerated” – that’s kind of what Fallout 3 is like over there. But even though the game I wanted is considered sacrilegious, Amazon’s Indian customer service reps still rendered impeccable service. Keep that in mind when you read the next paragraph.

So before we even begin, Amazon, I’m sorry for calling you out last week. You truly are the best in your chosen field. If you were a building, you would be the White House. If you were a spaceship, you would be Serenity. If you were a sandwich, you would have bacon.

While I wait for my new game to arrive, though, I’ve still been desperately trying to catch up on the video gaming I’d been putting off until the break. To fill up some time I rented the newest Halo game, Halo 3: ODST, because in spite of my mixed feelings about the Halo franchise I was still desperate to shoot something in the face.*

*On an even geekier note, ODST features the voice acting talents of Nathan Fillion of Firefly as well as Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, and their characters are romantically involved. This marriage of lead characters from my two favorite shows (and the potential half space pirate, half Cylon offspring it could produce) gives me the same sort of squealing, girlish rapture as Twilight does to the prepubescent and the prepubescent at heart.

I played through ODST surprisingly quickly, and when it was over I wondered if video games have been getting shorter as they continue to get more expensive. I’m serious – the end of ODST came after a couple of evenings’ worth of play, whereas I sank an entire summer into beating Super Mario 64 when I was a kid. I literally played Super Mario 64 like it was my job and it took me three months to beat, and now they’re charging $60 for a game I can finish in a couple of days? Was I just really stupid as a kid, or are video games actually getting shorter?

To find out, I fired up my Nintendo 64 and played some Perfect Dark, a video game that had more or less dominated my life all throughout middle school both in terms of the hours I spent playing it and the more plentiful (and infinitely more embarrassing) hours I spent writing fan fiction about it. I remember pouring a solid month into beating the game on its easiest difficulty as a child, and so I went back and started playing on the hardest difficulty, just to see how far I’d come and what had changed.

Enemy artificial intelligence has not come too far in the nearly ten years since Perfect Dark. About the biggest advancement is that enemies today throw grenades.

You see, in the violent video games I played when I was growing up, I very quickly learned that the best way to take out a posse of guards was to shoot one of them at a distance and then retreat around a corner and wait for the rest to blunder around the corner in pursuit, one by one, at which point I would calmly murder them one by one. Keep in mind that I learned this ice-cold commando tactic well before I learned my multiplication tables.*

*That said, I still don’t know most of them now.

When I try that in a newer game like ODST, however, enemies throw volleys of grenades at my hiding spot, forcing me to run out and slaughter them on their terms as opposed to at my leisure. Dicks. That’s about the biggest tactical advancement they’ve made.

Story in video games remains trivial and stupid, but now it’s trivial and stupid in a different way. Perfect Dark’s story existed mainly to link together several interesting locations in which to shoot people, but it included hallmarks of the craft such as flying cars, a clone of the president, and an alien named Elvis. It was scanty and stupid, but it really didn’t interfere with the fun too much.

The storyline for the Halo series, on the other hand, is honestly more complex than the Bible, in spite of the fact that it had the benefit of being written by ten or so people who spoke the same language over the course of five years. I looked up the complete and chronological storyline of the entire Halo series – games, books, short films – the other night, and while I still don’t have half a clue what’s going on, I can tell you that the franchise features not one but two omniscient ancient alien races, a military history more varied than Guam’s, and a half dozen or so artificial intelligence constructs with divergent motives and personalities. While back in the day video games had too little story, now they’ve got so much that you’re lucky if you even know why you’re shooting the people you’re shooting at any given time.

Despite the advancements that are, at best, limited, whether a game is running on my XBox or my Nintendo 64 doesn’t take any of the fun out of shooting guards in the face. One system just makes it look prettier than the other.

Still, I hope my new copy of Fallout 3 gets here soon, because I’m looking forward to some more aesthetically pleasing violence.

Truman Capps drinks a lot of Amaretto and Coke to silence the screams of all the guards he’s killed over the years.

An Open Letter To Amazon.com

Amazon has forced me to miss out on post apocalyptic alien space samurai. God DAMN it.

Amazon,

I ordered Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition on November 26th, and it shipped on the 28th. I had selected the standard shipping option, and I was told I could expect the game to arrive on December 8th.

I am a college student splitting my time between my home with my parents in Portland, Oregon, and my apartment at the University of Oregon. I had the game shipped to my apartment because I assumed, based on the estimate that I was given, that it would arrive before I left after the term ended for me on the 9th. However, the game did not arrive on the 8th, or the 9th, or any of the other days since. Because I'm not there to pick up the game, one of my roommates will have to repackage and mail it to me in Portland, which will take several more days.

I guess it's small potatoes in the big picture - I am, after all, fed, clothed, and getting an education, so I probably shouldn't be griping about having to face a delay in when I get to play a video game. But I had specifically been looking forward to spending my time off from school playing this game; it was my way of rewarding myself for working hard all term. I had thought about ordering it sooner, but I held off - I am a particular fan of the Fallout series, and I knew that if I had it with me while I was at school it would be one big fat temptation to not study. I addressed the package to my school address because your estimate said it would arrive on the day I finished my last final, which I figured would allow me to spend the afternoon playing the game before taking it and my XBox back up to my parents' house for the holidays.

Again, the more I make of this, the more I feel like a spoiled brat for even complaining, but hear me out: I feel that a cornerstone of human civilization is the trust that one can exchange currency for goods and services. Now, consider this - I gave you guys $42.00, and in return you've given me a bunch of lies about when my video game will arrive, plus no video game. I don't want to accuse you of anything, but what do you have against civilization?

I understand that once the item ships, it's in the hands of the United States Postal Service. You at Amazon really have no control over my game's amazing, time consuming adventures in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. However, while I was told that the game shipped on the 28th, according to the tracker it didn't leave the Seattle area until five days later, on December 3rd. To give you some perspective, it only took four days to get to the Moon - and that was 40 years ago. Both because my game spent five days being shipped nowhere and because you’re the ones who I gave my money to, I address this letter to you.

Incidentally, out of the $42.00 I spent roughly $3 on shipping and handling, and I really feel somewhat dishonest about that, seeing as your people have been shipping and handling my video game for so long now. I mean, my two-ounce video game spent a whopping four days in transit between Federal Way, Washington, and the sorting center in Portland, Oregon. You guys are shipping the HELL out of this video game - I feel as though I should give you more money, if anything.

On that same note, I did a little research, and according to Google Maps, a large highway known as Interstate 5 runs between Federal Way, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. From what Google says, it takes 2 hours and 28 minutes to get from Federal Way to Portland on I-5. I don't know why my game has taken four days. Maybe you were delivering my game via an Oregon Trail-style covered wagon pulled by a team of snails, or maybe you just had grandma deliver the game, and she spent four days putting along in her '84 Plymouth Ciera at 35 miles per hour in the left lane, turn signal blinking the whole time. But on the off chance that your delivery people just didn't know about I-5, I highly recommend it. In fact, I highly recommend the entire Interstate Highway System, because in my experience it's one of the most efficient ways to transport people (or, hey, even video games) over distances in less than four days.

Also, it might interest you to know that the same highway runs between Portland and Eugene. I only mention it because the last update on my stuff says that it left the sorting center in Portland three days ago, and perhaps the driver got lost on the way from Portland to Eugene. Also, I just checked, and it's possible to drive from San Fransisco to New York City in less than three days - almost less than two days. So again, you really should iron out some of the problems in your shipping department. Maybe get them a GPS unit for Christmas or something. Just don't order it from yourselves, because you probably won't get it until Easter.

Again, though, I really shouldn't be complaining, because it's just one luxury item that I'm waiting a little longer to use. There are bigger problems in the world, and my quality of life hasn't been affected that much. However, I was really looking forward to playing my game, starting on December 8th - the date that you told me. And for the past five days, I have not been playing my game. And that's frustrating to me. Not as frustrating as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for residents of the Gaza Strip, but frustrating all the same.

In the end, your entire business thrives on the fact that people are willing to buy something at a reduced price from your online store rather than spending a few bucks more for it at the mall. However, while this game probably would have run me $50 at GameStop on Black Friday, I guarantee you I would be playing it right now instead of amusing myself by writing blog entries. If the delivery aspect of Amazon.com colossally fails, like it did here, what are you really offering?

I get it – this is an isolated incident and by and large Amazon is one hell of a reliable way to get things. That said, could you at least refund my shipping or give me some store credit? I feel like this whole issue is pretty out of line.

Best,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps doesn't think this is such an out of line thing to to bitch about in an era of space travel and large hadron colliders.

Totally Boned

Well played, Google Image Search.

I had finished the last of my finals on Tuesday, first getting up at 7:00 and braving the penis-inverting cold of the early morning to take my anthropology exam before stumbling through my physics final with all the grace and poise of Kanye West. I was done at 5:00, and at roughly the same time, one of my friends from class was loading up his car to drive back to Portland.

“Why don’t you ride home with Jake?” Some people asked me. “It’s way cheaper and faster than taking the Amtrak bus on Wednesday.”

“Because,” I responded. “Taco Tuesday comes but once a week.”

So I went to Taco Tuesday at Taylor’s and enjoyed five tacos and an Amaretto and Coke,* then returned home to pack.

*I found out the hard way on a non-dollar well drink night that a double Amaretto and Coke costs $9 ordinarily. Liking bitch drinks is one thing – paying as much for one as a footlong Philly Cheesteak at Subway is another.

Packing for me is dictated by how much stuff I can fit into the green Nike duffel bag I won in a trivia contest when I was in middle school. I know from several years’ experience that it can hold 70% of my clothes, my toiletries kit, my slippers, and, when necessary, my laptop. Every time I pack I try to bend or break the laws of space and time by cramming more stuff in, which always results in failure and occasionally an uncomfortable ripping sound. After I graduate I may take the bag out back and shoot it.

Into my backpack I stuffed my XBox 360, the necessary cords, and three controllers, along with my external hard drive and a few other laptop doodads. I brought along my trumpet in its 600 pound black case, and a few of my music books, stuffed into a plastic Safeway bag because there was no room for them anywhere else.

Wednesday morning I rose at 10:00 and went to the bookstore to sell back my textbooks, netting me a clean $75 in cash. I celebrated with a burrito at Qdoba (which still cost less than a double Amaretto and Coke on any day but Tuesday), then returned home to gather my things and meet the bus.

I’ve spoken a lot about Amtrak’s bus service versus Greyhound on here before. I’ve made it clear that both outfits will screw you in the end, but Amtrak will screw you on a bus that doesn’t smell like pee and is populated by 30% fewer serial killers, thus making it the best choice. One of the advantages to Amtrak is that their buses offer service to the University of Oregon, picking riders up outside MacArthur Court.

I had bought a ticket on the Amtrak bus scheduled to leave Eugene at 1:15 PM, which was slated to stop at Mac Court at 12:50. Thus, I lugged all my bags up the hill and perched on the steps, waiting for the bus, the cold slowly sapping my will to live.

I had booked my ticket by calling JILL, Amtrak’s automated telephone ticket vending robot – and while I believe that robots are, in general, pretty cool, being the robot whose sole purpose in life is to shill out tickets for the obsolete train company is pretty sad. While JILL clearly got dealt a bum robo-hand, she remains one of the friendliest women I talk to on a regular basis, if not a little fuzzy about important details.

“Please spell out your last name, followed by your first name.”

“C-A-P-P-S, -T-R-*cough*-U-M-A-N.”

“I heard, C-A-P-P-S, T-R – is that correct?”*

“Yes. Wait, no!”

“Great! Moving on, would you like to pick up your tickets at the station?”

*My name on the ticket was TR Capps, which, I have decided, stands for Teodor Roosevelt Capps.

After speaking with JILL, I talked to a live operator who informed me that I could meet the bus on campus, ride it to the train station, and pick up my tickets there. I asked her, just to be sure, if the bus still stopped outside Mac Court, and she said yes.

So there I was, sitting outside Mac Court, when I see the bus come rolling up the street towards me. I was the only person outside Mac Court, the designated stopping place for the bus. I had baggage scattered around my feet in plain view. I stood up, waved to the driver, and turned around to gather my things.

When I turned back, the bus was just truckin’ on down the street.

I stood there for a second, watching it, wondering if this was some sort of weird bus driver prank. But he just kept on going and going, like the Energizer Bunny of boning all my best laid plans.

I left all my bags, packed with some odd $3500 worth of personal affects, unattended by the basketball arena and took off sprinting down the street like the T-1000, bemoaning the fact that I would once again have to write a blog about my continuing frustrations with Amtrak. What I’ve found is that while buses never seem to go fast enough while you’re inside of them, when you’re running along behind them they floor it like they’re John Cusak in 2012.

The bus had slowed up to turn the corner onto 18th, giving me a great chance to catch up, and I got close enough to choke on exhaust fumes. I had nearly made it to the door, which I could presumably hit with a balled up fist like Keanu Reeves in Speed in order to get the driver’s attention, but then the bus started to go up the hill. At that point, the bus couldn’t lose – not only was its engine competing with my weak writer’s legs, but its engine hadn’t had 15 pounds of Qdoba earlier in the day.*

*We both were experiencing similar problems with exhau[FART JOKE REDACTED]

I fell behind and watched the bus fade down the street, the bus driver evidently assuming that the guy running after him and waving his arms in the rear view mirror was just saying “GOODBYE! DRIVE FASTER!”

Head hung in defeat, I returned to my stuff. In elementary school I once chased an ice cream truck several blocks before the driver finally stopped, but I was younger then, and there were Choco Tacos on the line.

I called the train station several times, but while the operator had been perfectly willing to pick up a few minutes ago when I called to confirm that the bus was on time, she was mysteriously busy when I was calling to calmly inform them that their bus driver had plainly cornholed me and that they were all a bunch of cocksuckers.

I looked at my watch – it was 12:58. In 15 minutes the bus would leave, taking with it all my dreams of not being in Eugene anymore. I knew that the bus’s next stop would be the Eugene Amtrak station, where it would pick up passengers before leaving town at 1:15, but there was no way I could make it from campus to downtown with four bags in the next 15 minutes on foot.

On my right, I saw a guy of roughly my age walking out of Mac Court towards a pickup truck. Overcoming everything that my parents and the Oregon DMV had told me about hitchhiking, I ran up to the man as he got into his car and asked him if he could give me a ride to the train station if I gave him $20.* For proof, I pulled one of the crisp new bills I’d been given at the bookstore out of my pocket.

*In retrospect, $20 is an awful lot of money for a guy to drive you about a mile. My bus ticket itself cost roughly that much for a guy to drive me about 100 miles. On the other hand, I didn’t have any $10 bills and I didn’t want to give this guy a $20 and ask him for change. “Thanks so much! Not $20 so much, but definitely $10 so much!”

The man – Tim, as he introduced himself – agreed, and I clambered into his truck, throwing my bags into the back. We made light conversation on the way to the train station, and in the process, I found out that Tim was a driver for DoughCo, the local calzone delivery service. It made me feel less bad about approaching him out of the blue – picking up and dropping off was kind of his thing, and while I was hardly a bready pocket filled with meat and cheese, I tipped one hell of a lot better than most college students.

We pulled up to the train station with just a few minutes to spare, and there was the bus. As I thanked Tim and retrieved my bags, I rehearsed in my mind the verbal ass-kicking I was going to give this bus driver – the dipshit who, through his own negligence and inability to do his seemingly simple job correctly, had forced me to just about double the cost of my ticket and, more importantly, physically exert myself.

“Hey.” I said, leaning into the bus as I set my bags down at my feet. The bus driver was sitting in his seat, a newspaper in front of him.

“Yes?” He asked, pleasantly, looking up from his paper. He was in his 60s, a kindly look about him, like he’d be better suited to a job in a candy shop or as a friendly Southern doctor during the Great Depression who didn’t expect payment from needy families.

“You, uh…” Pull it together, Capps! I chided myself. Douchebags can work in candy stores too! “I was waiting at the University bus stop and you drove right on past me.”

“Say!” He said, getting out of his seat and stepping off the bus. “Is that a trumpet?”

He was pointing at my case.

“Uh, yes.”

“Well, sorry – no brass players on this bus. Woodwinds only!” Then he socked me on the arm and gave me a wide, friendly grin – the same grin he probably gave some impoverished hillbilly mother of three after she tried to pay him for curing her son’s measles. “I’m just messin’ with you!”

So I smiled and just sat at the back of the bus, bemoaning the fact that I was, in fact, the world’s biggest pussy.

The moral of the story is that you should always tip your DoughCo delivery boy, because those guys are heroes.

Truman Capps is going to write a nasty letter for this one.

Interviews

Oh man, I WISH.

One of the things that sucks about being a teaching assistant is that when you grade other students’ papers, you can suddenly empathize with the teaching assistants who will be grading your papers in a few days. This is problematic for me, because it helps if I can completely dehumanize the people who are evaluating my work in order to better hate them when they give me a bad grade.

Every time a student fails to make an adequate logical connection or doesn’t properly back something up with facts, I’m quick to jump in with the red pen and make some snarky comments about how that could have been avoided. But now, as I pull together my final story for Reporting 1 to turn in tonight, all I can imagine is my professor hovering over it with a red pen of her own, seeing all the mistakes that I missed, preparing to make a few snarky comments herself.

My final story for Reporting 1 has been the labor of several weeks, a story about the difficulties faced by public school music programs as a result of budget cuts and the craptacular economy. The story has been difficult because I’ve been trying to interview national sources, and apparently people in Minnesota don’t believe in answering emails.

The band director in question agreed to be interviewed three weeks ago, but after I sent him the questions he apparently decided that, no, he’d rather spend his time ice fishing or masturbating to hockey or whatever they do out there, and instead of telling me that I should look for a new interview source, he just quit responding to my emails and decided to let me figure it out the hard way. Now here I am, seven hours away from my deadline, anxiously waiting on a response while in all likelihood the band director is probably sipping a Harvey Wallbanger on the shore of any one of his fine state’s 10,000 lakes.

In all likelihood, I’m going to have to do without his interview, which probably means I’m going to get some red pen on the part of the paper where I talk about his band because I don’t have a quote from him there. And of course, it makes sense to me that I don’t have that interview there, but when my professor is grading it, all it’s going to look like is me either being lazy and opting not to conduct sufficient interviews, or stupid and forgetting to conduct sufficient interviews. Basically, thanks to the actions of another person I’m going to look like a bad journalist, and as it is I don’t need any help.

If anything, this experience has taught me to empathize with the students whose papers I’m grading – now I realize that maybe there are reasons that some of them don’t have sufficient research to back up their conclusions. Of course, they’re getting most of their information from books, and never in my life have I opened a book and had it say, “I’m not going to give you the facts you need until well after your deadline!”

This is part of the reason I envy history majors – while journalism majors have to report on the here and now, with its uncertainty and its do-nothing Midwestern band directors, history majors report on the past, which is considerably more set in stone. Nobody expects you to actually conduct an interview with Abraham Lincoln (although if you did, you’d totally get an A), so instead you can just use well established source documents that will always be there for you and never let you down. Sure, history is still a time consuming major that requires many long hours spent in the library, but I’d honestly rather blow a few weeks sitting around in the library looking for information I know is there than trying to get it out of some big Minnesotan cocktease.

Journalistic Interview Techniques:

a) Bribe them with candy
-Versatile; everyone likes candy
-Not effective on diabetics (unless in insulin shock)
-Do not withhold candy from a diabetic in insulin shock to get interview; this is unethical, and more importantly, people in insulin shock are bad sources

b) Tell them you’ve kidnapped their family
-No threats necessary; the knowledge alone will do the trick
-Difficult to pull off if subject is with family when you tell him they’ve been kidnapped
-Might put you in tricky legal territory

c) Actually kidnap their family
-No longer have to worry about subject being with family when you tell him they’ve been kidnapped
-Definitely puts you in tricky legal territory

d) Ask nicely
-Works 15% of the time
-People from Minnesota are immune

e) Bribe with sexual favors
-Versatile; everyone likes sexual favors
-Difficult for stories about the clergy unless you work for the middle school newspaper
-Do not recommend for stories about the National Herpes Convention

Truman Capps thinks it was very kind not to slander the band director by name in this update, seeing as that slothful bastard basically cost him several highly valuable points on his final.

Taco Tuesday

Man, if I had one of those things, it'd be so much easier to make tacos...

One of my great passions in life is free food. It just doesn’t get much better than a meal that you know you don’t have to pay for – and while in the long run there is supposedly no such thing as a free lunch, in the short term I am more than willing to attend your Campus Young Republicans for Christ meeting if there’s free pizza (preferably Papa John’s).

Almost as good as free food is ludicrously cheap food. Sure, you’re still spending money, but if you can feed yourself using only pocket change I’d say that you’re still doing pretty well (please note that this does not count if you eat the pocket change). IKEA is a pioneer in this field, thanks in part to their 50-cent hot dog, among other menu items. Sure, you may have just spent $20,000 on disassembled furniture with cute names* and the hot dog is probably made of hair and pig anus anyway, but still! Think of the savings!

*My desk chair is named Rutger. This is as close as I will ever get to realizing my dream of sitting on Rutger Hauer’s lap.

Free or cheap alcohol, as I have recently discovered, is also something to cherish. Booze costs a lot more than soda – most likely because the principal ingredients are more than high fructose corn syrup and seltzer water – but the experiences it provides last a lifetime. The problem is that far fewer campus organizations offer free alcohol as an incentive to attend their meetings (save for certain fraternities, but then you’re expected to put out).

At the intersection of cheap booze and cheap liquor lies Taylor’s Bar and Grill, the campus watering hole right across the street from the University. Just as Optimus Prime can change from an ordinary truck into an awesome heroic robot, every Tuesday Taylor’s changes from an ordinary bar into an awesome heroic source of 50-cent tacos and $1 well drinks. Both, also, are from space.

It’s been painful these past few months, watching my over-21 friends go to Taylor’s on Tuesday nights sober and hungry and come home drunk and on the verge of vomiting up record numbers of tacos.* So many of my friends go to Taco Tuesday that Facebook is more or less a ghost town on Tuesdays from 9:00 until 11:00, after which it comes alive again with drunken status updates and embarrassing pictures.

*The current record in the Oregon Marching Band is 13 tacos in one night, set yesterday by our tiniest Asian. I challenge you, readers, to outdo him next week.

Last night was my first night at Taco Tuesday, and it definitely did a lot to wash out the bad taste left in my mouth by my negative bar experience in Salem last week. Sure, the drinks were mixed with the cheapest of alcohol and the taco meat was probably made of hair and cow anus, but seldom have I found both savings and Good Times in the same place at once.

My thoughts:

Amaretto and Coke is a really good drink. Yes, I know that it’s also traditionally what bridesmaids drink before getting knocked up by somebody’s cousin at a wedding reception, but did you ever consider that maybe they drink it because it’s delicious?

The salt/tequila/lime shot, on the other hand, did not live up to my expectations. I’d heard my parents talk about it and watched drunk girls try to figure out the steps at parties* - hell, it was in Caddyshack, for God’s sake, and if that doesn’t give something legitimacy, I don’t know what does. But all I got out of it – and hey, who knows, maybe I did it wrong – was three distinctly unpleasant tastes, followed by the gripping fear that I, like 80% of all people who consume tequila, would become violently ill.

*”So, wait… It’s lime, salt, tequila?”
“No, no, it’s tequila, lime, tequ- no, salt!”
“Maybe it’s salt, tequila, lime?”
“Yeah, let’s try that!”
“Okay, so it’s tequila, salt, lime?”
“No, wait, what are we doing?”

Karaoke could not exist without alcohol. I watched people get up on that stage who clearly knew that they had no business singing in front of people, but had been led to believe that maybe alcohol enhances your vocal cords (after all, it worked for Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis…).

Dead Week is the best time to go to Taco Tuesday, because all the bros who would ordinarily be there are instead at home, desperately cramming in hopes of passing a couple of classes, whereas the rest of us have the time to go out and grab a drink or two before going home to desperately cram in hopes of passing a couple of classes.

Lines do not exist in bars. I learned this the hard way when I stood behind a guy waiting to order at the bar and then watched several other people walk up to the open spaces on my right and left and order ahead of me. There is no reason that a line wouldn’t exist at the bar – it would still serve the purpose of “first come, first served” – but it simply doesn’t. When it comes to alcohol, it’s every man for himself.

Lines DO exist in the bathroom, something that I also learned the hard way.

Truman Capps is going to find every bar in Eugene that offers cheap tacos on a certain night, and then he will reap the savings all week long.