U.S. States, ranked by credibility

As in, “Oh, you’re from ______?” How impressed will your conversation partner be?

TIER ONE: Practically their own countries

• California
• New York
• Texas

TIER TWO: Everyone knows what’s up with these States

• Washington and Oregon (bff with California)
• Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts (wish they were New York)
• Maryland and Virginia (they fight for custody of D.C.)
• Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Florida, Nevada, Hawaii (we all kind of like these ones)
• Louisiana, Utah (some bad juju here)

TIER THREE: Everyone remembers facts about these States from high school

• North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Minnesota (vague generalizations)
• Kentucky, Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Connecticut, West Virginia (we’re all glad we don’t live here)

TIER FOUR: Your boss’s brother lived here one time, you think

• Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota, New Hampshire (warm fuzzy feelings)
• Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Alabama, South Carolina (vague unease)
• Maine, Alaska, Nebraska, Mississippi, Vermont (never even met anyone from there)

TIER FIVE: These may as well not even be States

• Deleware, Rhode Island (They’re just tax havens with gas stations)
• North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho (guarantee you’d never miss ‘em)

BONUS ROUND: Did you know we own these ones?

• Puerto Rico (they’ll be a state in fifty years, guaranteed)
• Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands (how’d we get these?)
• the Phillipines (someday we’ll be back)

Live-Blogging the Kentucky Derby

Look people, I watch the Derby every year, whether I want to or not, and you should too. Did you see it? What do you mean you missed it? People, Kentucky asks very little of you. All it asks for is two minutes of your time per year. Is that so bad? Jesus. Here's what you missed.

**********

4:30
Woke up from a nap after my property exam. Well, not really a nap, I kind of just laid in bed for two hours listening to techno music. Read Hunter S. Thompson's essay 'The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.' Remembered that the Derby was on, got the idea to live-blog it.

4:39
Got out of the shower. Made a cup of coffee and some peanut butter crackers, put on NBC.

4:41
"We can be heroes!" montage of trainers and their stories of their journey to the top. Reminds me of 'Rocky,' but with horses. I don't know who any of these people are. PROTIP: all trainers are overweight white men with facial scars.

4:44
Except Bob Baffert. He's kind of a big deal. He told the camera a story he just told Michael Phelps. Yeah, I know Michael Phelps, and he's here. I told him this story. He said it was awesome. Douchebag. He's training 'Pioneerof the Nile,' with a dumb typo built into his real name. I'll root against that one.

4:49
Trainer of 'Musket Man; couldn't be sleazier if he tried. He's got this shifty facial tic whenever he answers questions, the kind of thing you see on a guy who has NO idea what you're looking for, officer. He's dressed...well, he's dressed like I am, except 50 pounds heavier and a million dollars richer.

5:02
National Anthem. They got LeAnn Rimes? Oh lord. The Derby is so 1998.

5:10
Bob Costas shows us a film about horse safety. Probably kind of an issue since last year Eight Belles died on the track. That was Hillary Clinton's horse, by the way; probably cost her the nomination. Lot of talk about steroids. Think if a horse smoked pot it would be barred from competition? How do you make a horse smoke pot?

5:16
No, seriously. Maybe you could put pot butter in oatmeal. But horses like oats raw, don't they?

5:23
Bob Costas is still talking about horse drugs.

5:24
Some guy said that horses in most places race on oats, water, and nothing else. He is met by blank silence from Bob Costas. His headset microphone has a flesh-colored dust cover on the end and it makes his face look like it has a large growth.

5:29
SWINE FLU! MUSLIM CLERICS! FLASH FLOODS! POSSIBLE TORNADOES! WARREN BUFFET! Flim at eleven.

5:31
Are you kidding me? Extreme close-up of Larry Jones, Eight Belles' trainer, the horse that died on the track last year, IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE RACE? Are you kidding me? They put a camera in his face immediately after his Derby horse dies on live TV? This is awful. And he's retiring? Jesus, NBC, pull my heartstrings a little more. What are you, Steven Spielberg?

5:34
I could pretend that I have the faintest idea which horse will win, but I have no clue. All kind of stats and strange names and odds spreads I can't make heads or tails of.

5:37
Now it's time for 'Hat Parade' from Oil of Olay's ProX. Cut to shots of women in hats they should be ashamed of, while Sex In the City-type music plays. The horse 'Chocolate Candy' was named by Jenny Craig. No joke.

5:42
Kent Desmoreaux flashes his previous-winner Derby Rings in the locker room like he can't believe how gangsta he is. What are you, T-Pain? Get out of here with that jewelery, little man, this isn't the Super Bowl.

5:45
Literally every trainer is wearing huge mirrored shades like they're bouncers at the least-bitchin' club in the world. Or maybe they look more like federal agents. This isn't 'The Matrix,' dawg, it's Kentucky. One exception: Tom McCarthy, the charming 75-year-old trainer of 'General Quarters' is so adorable and nervous you just want to tickle him.

5:47
Alright, I'm game. I'll put $5 on 'General Quarters' to win, and what the hell, $5 on 'Dunkirk' to show.

5:51
Is that Ed Harris?

5:54
Picture flying a horse in from Dubai. On a damn airplane. Just picture it. Also, none of these commentators have any idea what's going on. They're just spouting off horse names like they know about horse racing. But hey, that's what we all do, every one of us.

5:59
It occurred to me that if a horse wins the Derby it does nothing but get laid for the rest of its life. I wonder if that has ever occurred to a horse.

6:03
45-second zoom-out shot of a tractor dragging a bag of sand. And they say horse racing isn't exciting.

6:06
I need to say that jockey uniforms are the most ridiculous garments ever devised. Call VICE Magazine, I found out where the DON'Ts come from.

6:09
Still proud of that last snap.

6:10
Yum! Brands, a Kentucky corporation that owns KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, is running tons of commercials to tell us that they're putting KFCs all over the world, even in China. Actually, it makes me kind of sad to think of a bright, garishly-lit Taco Bell in downtown Istanbul.

6:12
Big horse parade, trumpet solo, 'My Old Kentucky Home,' let's not get sentimental here. You know the drill. By the way, you do know in the original lyrics the line was "This summer the darkies are gay," right?

6:22
What does Rick James' 'Superfreak' have to do with Visa debit cards? If you use Visa, you're freaky and fun? What about all these people singing the song in different locations? RRRRR Send in Don Draper to fix this commercial.

6:26
Alright guys, here it comes. General and Dunkirk.

6:29
ok gogogo cmon RR coming in RR forward go general go go cmon where are you DK in 8 on outside around the turn GQ 12 down toward rail they're moving up none of my horses are in the fron who cares how bout papa clam cmon papa clem RR 2nd Pioneer coming in here comes hold me back join int he dance still in front CC coming around? Ardount toward home, Join still in lead RR!! Pioneer coming in! MM PAPA CLEM OH MAY WHAT IS THAT HE BLOWS IT OUT MINE THE BIRD what???? MINE THE BIRD RUNS AWAY WITH IT BY A COUNTRY MILE how did that happen? That's it, that's who won. Mine the Bird. Big upset, 50-1.

6:31
And that's it - it's over. Almost as quickly as it began. If you dropped $10 on Mine the Bird you'd have $500 now. You get money if you bet on Pioneer to place. If you exacta'd anything you're SOL, cos I guarantee you didn't put money on Mine the Bird. I dropped $10 (hypothetically), but you know, if when you gamble you expect to win money you shouldn't be gambling. Happy Derby day guys, and remember what Hunter S. Thompson said:

"Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomitting in the urinals. 'They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the front of their suits,' I said. 'But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomitting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.' ”

Once more with feeling

We're going to try a soft re-launch of this blog. Again, again. But for real this time. If it catches on, feels good, I'll migrate over to here from the facebook notes.

Facebook has the advantage of making sure your friends see it, but there's a lot of disadvantages that go along with it. I'm going to try sacrificing audience for quality and see if anything comes of it.

So. There's that then. Actual content to follow.

What was wrong with the 90's?

I saw The Doom Generation (1995) last night: it was in the cult section at the video store, looked interesting. Mixed feelings about it. Great directing: the film was edgy and exciting and visually very creative. And it had incredibly explicit sex and violence and Rose McGowan spent pretty much the whole film naked, so there's another plus. This, however, doesn't make up for an abominably bad script and downright unforgivable acting.

But it got me thinking about the 1990s. What was wrong with the world then? You had Bill Clinton, the internet, video games, a good economy, you'd think things were going well. But the culture of the times seems (today, anyway) garish and nihilistic. Things were ostensibly going well, but I have to think that Nevermind and Blue Velvet and Rent wouldn't have been made if there wasn't some unexplainable current of despair running through the American collective unconscious. Douglas Coupland probably knows what I'm talking about.

Then again, maybe avant-garde nihilism was a way of escaping the cultural wasteland of an increasingly corporate/consumerist society. But that doesn't make it good art.

Here's an untapped market: Urban-marketed chewing gum. Picture a gold foil packet filled with nuggets of gum shaped like cut diamonds and little interlocked chains, in flavors like "Ballin' Blueberry", "Pimpin' Pineapple", "Gangsta Grape".

The key to ballin' is, of course, ostentatious spending. The gum will cost five to ten dollars a pack. How baller would you be if you spent ten bucks on premium chewing gum?

Self-Help

Or, I could make a little money by writing a self-help book. You don't actually need to give very good advice at all; all you have to do to get published is make a lot of metaphysical claims and paint a big picture, and tell people where they fit.

How about this: Because of chaos theory and all the rest, everything is connected to everything else. Everything you do affects everything else in the world to some extent. So, when somebody does something evil or a big catastrophe happens, it is literally your fault. You are responsible for 9/11, for Katrina, for the JFK assassination, because of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. What should you do about it? Well, since everything's so complex and you don't know what consequences will follow from your actions, the best thing to do is nothing at all.

That's pretty liberating, don't you think? It's your fault that the war in Iraq is going poorly - specifically your fault - and you shouldn't bother doing anything about it. That would sell a million copies. It's better than "The Secret", for sure.