DUCK THIS

Duh duh da, duh duh da da da, duh duh da, duh duh da da, duh duh da, duh da, duh da da ... mighty Oregon!

VS.

Today at 7 Eastern/4 Pacific, it's on. And I, for one, choose to suspend my powers of rational analysis and replace it with the sincere belief that we can pull this off. Bob Rickert at the Big O Ducks Blog says they'll have to play a perfect game to win. The lack of 'stache may not be a great sign, but need one without rational capacity necessarily lapse into superstition? Best not to dwell on this question.

Andrew "Nomaduck" Adams, who bravely predicts a 38-31 Ducks victory in the comments to my last post, is back at it again at the given-up-for-dead group blog The Loop. If anybody wants to join him but has forgotten their access (or never was a part but wants in regardless) send me an e-mail.

Anyway, the week of non-posting at the Canard is explained by a major project I've been undertaking for work, and the lack of posting that is sure to follow will have the same cause. Until then, a few pop culture-ish things I noticed this week:

• If you haven't seen the latest edition of the Oregon Commentator, allow me to introduce it here:
  
  
  That is, click on the image and decide for yourself if this thing isn't so damn sexy. Props to incoming chief editor Ian Spencer: I haven't seen layout this good since Dan was designing our pages. I don't know of a first-edition Commentator going to press before classes started at least since OBR was running the show. Plus, Bryan "E-Rocky Confidential" Roberts is the new publisher. He's first "Another Perspective" columnist to become the OC's publisher, but as I told him recently, he isn't the first OC staffer to leave the magazine for the military and return in such a capacity. The Company has been around for awhile like that. And it looks like the new leadership is off to a good start.


• Congratulations to my old roommate Jason George, whose blockbuster Chicago Tribune story this week about Farm Aid's excessive overhead costs had Neil Young ripping the newspaper to pieces and snarling "This is the sickest piece of journalism I have ever seen!" at a televised press conference, and reduced Willie Nelson to a confused mess on "Real Time with Bill Maher" last night (though in Willie's defense, he was probably stoned). And another former roommate and co-worker, Eric Pfeiffer, is risking his life (maybe) to report on Hurricane Rita from Texas. Pfeiffer may be in the disaster zone, but George has an angry Canadian folk-rocker to watch out for. Best of luck to both.


• At long last, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" returns to HBO tomorrow night, and the stateside premiere of "Extras" — Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's follow-up to "The Office" — follows immediately after. I'm not in the habit of staying up to 11 on Sunday evenings, but I'll have to get into that habit.


• While I'm on the subject of television, I made sure to tune in for the debut of the Chris Rock-produced/co-written "Everybody Hates Chris" — this being the first time I've ever made a point of watching something on UPN that wasn't a Nats game. If next week's show is anything like the debut, I'll be tuning in the week after, and the one after that. Surfergirl and Steven Taylor are right; it's good-natured and funny, no mean feat. And apparently the ratings were good; in fact, it was the highest-rated debut ever for a UPN show, and even beat Fox's wildly-popular "The OC" (which I have never seen and never will).


• There's a little ditty I once heard, more than a decade ago, on the Z100 station in my hometown (I assume every Z100 station from Bangor to San Diego played it) that has stuck in my head to this day. I can still recite it word for word almost exactly. Ahem:
  

  Everyday at four o'clock when all the soaps are over, I turn on my television
  To watch my favorite talk show, it gives my brain a rest
  Oh what a day when I tune in, saw the most amazin' thing
  Phil Donahue had found his perfect guest!
  
  She was an alcoholic, co-dependent, sex-addicted lesbian, from a disfunctional family
  The only girl to be adopted by a mixed-race couple from Boise, Idaho
  She had a premature baby from a marriage to a man who liked to dress up in her clothing
  Why she joined that convent, friends, I'll never know...
  
  Now, she can't eat red meat after dark in the months between Lent and Rosh Hashana
  These are the dietary rules of a cult she joined in 1985
  They live in bunkers underground waiting for the Armageddon
  Shirley MacLaine is their savior
  And yes, they believe that Elvis is alive!

  Why do I post this now? Partly because I can't find it anywhere on the webular inter-matrix, and perhaps another Z-listener of yore might one day choose to relive the (mostly regrettable) period. But also because, as I found at the Drudge Report this week, it seems that Art Bell has found his perfect guest in Scott Stevens, "the Idaho weatherman who blames the Japanese Mafia for Hurricane Katrina." It's like HAARP meets "The Coming Global Superstorm" (which, if you didn't know, was the inspiration for "The Day After Tomorrow"). Art, once you put this guy on you can finally retire ... again, for like the third time.


• Speaking of Drudge, he's still as slow on the updates as I've complained before. Earlier in the week, the headline "SUNRISE OVER GALVESTON" stayed in the top spot until at least four in the afternoon. Which reminds me that earlier this week I happened past Nick Denton's Drudge-ish Sploid, a site I gave a thumbs-sideways review when it debuted in April. Have a look at it now: after a major site re-design, it's even tabloidier than ever and much easier to peruse. And if you drag your browser window wide enough, notice how the stories wrap around the banner. Pretty cool. More at BusinessWeek.


• On a completely different subject, during a single hour of "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" reruns this week, I'll be damned if I didn't see two different commercials for two different companies using two different Postal Service songs. One for the Honda Civic looped a lyric-less "We Will Become Silhouettes" behind its voice-over, and another for Kaiser Permanente used the intro to "Such Great Heights" (a song which was already used in the commercial for a (short-lived?) ABC hospital drama(dy?)). Which is all well and good; I've never put much stock in the idea of "selling out" so long as the music remains interesting. But whatever happened to the AdAge- and Pitchfork-reported deal between PS the band and USPS the government agency to put some Gibbard/Tamborello tunes into TV ads? Beats me.


• And you've probably seen this before, but if not, you've got to check out the ZoomQuilt:
  
  
  If nothing else, it will save you a few bucks on the LSD that you can't buy these days anyway.

Oh, and before I forget: GO DUCKS!!! At the very least I'll have a post-game update later tonight.

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posted by WWB at 3:04 PM |