Hot Weather and Things That Suck About It

Unless you were living in a cave this week (one with air conditioning, I might add), you probably noticed that it got quite hot here in the Eastern United States. We topped 90 here in the burg 2 or 3 days in a row, and I could be wrong, but the last time I checked the calendar, it said APRIL. Hell, two weeks ago, it was SNOWING!

I should be used to this by now; after all, I did grow up in Syracuse, where it was true when you said, "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes." We're used to the weather going from winter to spring for about a week, then promptly skipping ahead to summer, complete with high heat and humidity. On some days, it even skips straight from winter to summer and BACK. For example, one early January day last year, the temperature shot from 45 to 70 overnight, only to plunge to the 20s in a matter of hours.

So, here in the 'Burg, we went from a cooler-than-normal March to about a week of seasonal weather, and then Mother Nature's hand slipped on the thermostat and the temps shot to record levels. Here's where living in the world's smallest apartment comes into play. Did I mention I do not have air conditioning? The reason for this is that when the previous tenant moved out, the lone AC in the building went to another apartment, but it belongs here. Negotiations are underway, but I am prepared to pull an Ariel Sharon, declare my neighbor a "terrorist" and occupy his apartment until I get said AC back. On the other hand, a week ago, this wasn't an issue, because the temperatures were actually SEASONABLE!

Did I also mention I live on the top floor of my building? Here's a quick lesson on thermodynamics (a big word I learned from Mr. Dowler's high school physics class): heat rises. When you live on the top floor, therefore, you are in the hottest apartment. Now, when you have a lot of heat and want to get rid of it, you must get it out, and the best method (besides an air conditioner) is to pt a fan in the window, the larger the better. Which I have. It does nothing. First of all, I have to keep the fan on and the window open during the day due to the fact that to close up my apartment during the day means that the heat coming from my refrigerator exhaust has nowhere to go, and it builds up. I believe it is now possible to replicate Arizona, or the Sahara, or more appropriately, Hell in my apartment whenever I want.

Home is not an option for passing the time away during a heat wave these days. So, you go in search of a place with AC. Malls are popular for this reason, but then you wind up spending money, and as you all know, I work in radio, so I have no money. Spending $80 on new headphones and new shorts to last through this heat wave is considered a shopping spree for me. Somebody stop me before I break triple digits! Time to pray that you have a workplace with air conditioning. I have two of them, of course, and there are pros and cons to each. The YMCA has air conditioning, however, it is very LOUD, SO YOU HAVE TO YELL WHEN YOU'RE TALKING TO THE CUSTOMERS OR EVEN YOUR CO-WORKER STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU! The radio station has AC... in the business office. The studio does not, and it is located in a storefront, as I have mentioned in previous columns. Therefore, from 9:00 on, the sunlight and heat comes right in unabated. Again, fans do not solve this problem. On the other hand, it could be much worse. My friend Jacinta (gee, first Dowler, now this, everyone's getting a mention this week...) is a waitress, and damned if the AC didn't break in the part of the restaurant she usually works in.

Which brings me to another cold hard fact, no wait, there's nothing cold about it, let me try that again... another harsh fact about heat waves: they always happen at the worst possible time. The AC breaks... on the first day of a heat wave. You realize your car is low on coolant and you need to get it topped off... on the first day of a heat wave. No sense in going to a full-service gas station to get the job done; not that aren't any, but by the time you drive the necessary distance, your car's already too hot to get the radiator cap off.

While we're on the timing issue, and as everyone knows, I am the King of (Bad) Timing, let's weigh this weather truism: hot weather brings thunderstorms. Or it's supposed to. As much as you wanted to slug your local TV weatherman last winter when he caused a general panic by forecasting The Great Snowstorm That Never Was, you'll want to skip the slugging and go straight to medieval torture when you see him or her start forecasting the cold front and thunderstorms that will break the heat wave. On Monday, he or she says it will happen Wednesday; on Tuesday, it will happen on Thursday; by Thursday, it's been pushed back again to Friday. On Friday, the thunderstorms are forecasted to arrive... but they don't. Meanwhile, you have made sure you took the step of rolling your car windows up so as not to be driving a mobile swimming pool when the storm is over. So, when you come back to your car and no rain has fallen, you open your door and for one brief moment you can actually see Satan in the passenger's seat saying, "Come on in, the weather's great." Then, naturally, when you have reached your destination, you leave the windows rolled down, and THEN the thunderstorms come. I know it, I live it, every freakin' summer.

And people wonder why tempers get as hot as the thermostat when this happens. Ask the typical road rage driver who just went postal on some guy who cut him off, and he'll tell you the same story: 6th day of a 2-day heat wave, his interior is soaked from when he left his windows down, but now the interior is literally steaming hot because he rolled them up just before the sun came out. He's speeding off to some place that's air conditioned, perhaps the supermarket because he just ran out of bottled water or maybe the mall to get the AC he didn't think he'd need for another month or to replace the one that just broke. And this #%@&ing moron just cut him off! I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it happens.

I was talking to someone not long into this stretch of hot weather, and that person actually said, "The way this weather keeps changing, it'll probably snow this weekend." The forecast (take it with a whole pound of salt) is calling for lower 40s Sunday night when this heat finally breaks. If it drops any lower and this guy is right, I may just have to go Ariel Sharon on HIM...

The Second Season

Now I know you just read the title and you have made your assumptions as to what this column is about. No, it's not about the NBA or NHL playoffs. Yes, I know college basketball ended two weeks ago, and baseball just started. No, by "second season", I would be referring to the new spring television season. It's gotten to the point where your "mid-season replacements" have become more ballyhooed than some of the fall premieres. And then they get yanked just as quickly.

Take "Wednesday 9:30/8:30 Central", for example. Yes, that was the name of the show. Was, as in the show is no longer on the air. Didn't know it was going to be? You're probably not alone. It aired twice. That's it. Twice. And then it was cancelled. It seems that the shelf life of a new sitcom is about the same as that of a head coach for the Washington Redskins. How do you give a show a chance to build an audience when you only give it two weeks? I watched both episodes, and I thought the second was better than the first. The third could've been better than the second, but we'll never know. "Wednesday 9:30/8:30 Central" had a bad opening rating, and then the second week was apparently not too rosy either, and that's all it took. Now, on the other hand, "The George Lopez Show" did decently the first week, did better the second week, and suddenly, it's a hit. All after two weeks.

And what's even worse is when a show doesn't get a chance to find its audience because it is constantly shifted. "The Tick" on Fox was the latest example last fall. After one or two weeks in its original Thursday time slot, they pre-empted it the next week for another show, then a special, then they brought it back on Thursday, then they aired another episode on a Wednesday, and then it took another week off, and then they announced it was cancelled. Well, what were they expecting? Most casual TV viewers don't read up on their TV listings enough to follow a TV show all over the weekday map. They watch a show one week, if they like it, they tune in the same time next week. If the show's not there, they assume it's gone and they watch something else. Even if it comes back, they may not go back, probably because they found something else to watch.

Ranting aside, let's look at some of the new shows that look pretty good. Of course, we have to start with the runaway hit of the moment, MTV's "The Osbournes". Ozzy goes from most evil man in America to the patriatch of everybody's favorite obscenity-spewing, dog doo-cleaning, neighbor-annoying family. I honestly don't get this show. America loves it, but the one episode I saw, I didn't understand. I mean, I thought it was pretty funny how they were blasting music and throwing cheese to get the neighbors to stop their 3 A.M. sing-alongs, but there were other parts where it just looked like outtakes from "The Real World". And speaking of which, I tried to give "Real World" another chance. I thought Chicago had possibilities, but after 5 or 6 episodes, even superhottie cast member Keri failed to hold my attention. Anyway, back to "Ozzy Minus Harriet"; I guess the appeal is in how over-the-top they are in terms of being anything but conventional. More like how a conventional family would look if you watched them after dropping acid. Maybe I'll just have to watch a couple more episodes to figure it all out. On the other hand, I never got Ozzy's music, either.

Back to ABC and George Lopez. He is very funny, and I know the whole buzz around this show is the fact that the cast is mostly Latino (a rare thing on network television), but honestly, that means nothing to me. I'd like the show no matter what the nationality of the cast members were, and isn't that really what ABC is trying to establish, that anyone can do a good show, regardless of race or ethnic origin? The Bob & Tom factor helped here, because George Lopez was a frequent guest on their show and still calls in occasionally to share the experiences from his new-found fame. The episode and a half I saw were both very good, very well written, and George is a natural. I highly recommend this one.

Over to Fox for two new shows I've had the opportunity to catch recently. "Greg the Bunny" has gotten a lot of good reviews, and they're well-earned. The simple concept of the puppets having their own lives is hilarious. The monkey character alone is three-times divorced and fighting a weight problem that causes him to have to be re-stitched in one episode when he blows out a seam. Also, any time you put Eugene Levy and Seth Green in a show and do it right, you have a hit. Also new on Fox is "Andy Richter Controls the Universe". Yeah, I know, dumb-sounding title, probably a show thrown together to give the former Conan O'Brien sidekick his 15 minutes of fame. However, the one episode I got to see (the second one is currently being recorded so that I can hit the sack at a decent hour tonight) was very good. I guess I'm just a fan of the quick-cut-to-a-fantasy-sequence bit that has worked so well in other shows, and this show does it well. Not quite as well as "Family Guy", a show I have re-discovered in the process of discovering the other two Fox sitcoms, but then again, there are some jokes you just can't do without animation. In the case of "Family Guy", the reason the show has never gotten more than a cult following is because it is pretty quick-witted, and you have to know your pop culture in order to get all the jokes, and you have to be paying attention. The thing packs in more laughs-per-minute than any of the best from Monty Python or Mel Brooks.

The only new offering I've seen from any of the other networks was "Watching Ellie" on NBC, and that of course was purely to see if the "Seinfeld curse" was alive and well with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Well, despite some evidence and reviews to the contrary, it is. The show I saw was not very funny, the gag with the short guy trapped in the cat carrier was dumb and probably insulting, and the whole device of the clock in the corner of the screen had me doing what a lot of people who have seen this show have done: count down the seconds to the end of this thing. Even making it transparent like those annoying little network logos doesn't deflect attention.

However, perhaps the best programming move in recent days came from that cable titan, E! Yes, E! They put classic episodes of "Saturday Night Live" on at 7 P.M. every night, and it is great. Unlike the old 30-minute editions they threw together for syndication, these actually save most of the content of the original episodes, going from Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin's "Weekend Update" to Richard Dreyfus singing a tune with Paul Shaffer (with hair!) playing the piano, or from a Coneheads sketch to Billy Joel playing "Just the Way You Are". Classic TV like this should be treasured. Just goes to show ya, sometimes bringing back something that worked 25 years ago does just as well as a slew of new shows. Especially when you give it more than two weeks.

How Do You Predict a Farce?

Yeah, I know it's a week into the baseball season and NOW I'm doing predictions. Well, remember my circumstances over the past month and also the fact that a week in, absolutely NOTHING is settled in a sport where the regular season is 162 games long. Especially considering that as I am writing this, all 5 teams in the National League East are right where they started a week ago, all tied, all with the same number of wins as losses (they're all 3-3).

Furthermore, I can be cavalier with making predictions on how this season will end because right now I am still 100% certain that this season WILL NOT have an end. I am just as sure now as I was six months ago when I originally made my prediction that there will not be a World Series. There is no collective bargaining agreement, the players' union will never agree to the one thing that baseball needs in order to keep all of its teams competitive (a salary cap), and the threat of contraction still hangs over the game at the end of the season. The owners' recently pledged that they would not lock the players out this season, a decision immediately ripped by the union as indicating they would try to declare an impasse after the season. Therefore, a players' strike is now inevitable; you won't hear about it until late in the season, just like in '94, when the rhetoric will grow to a fever pitch and Donald Fehr will finally declare that the owners will not keep the players from their ridiculously high salaries. And that will be it. Strike. End of season. No World Series in 2002. Possibly no World Series ever again.

And now, pessimism aside, here's my picks for the 2002 season should I prove to be wrong and we actually carry on to the finish...

NL East: The Mets and Braves spent a lot of money and did a lot of wheeling and dealing trying to perfect their teams. In fact, Steve Phillips is still trying to perfect the team, making a couple of deals in the past week involving unknown relievers in an apparent effort to find the perfect 25th man. He may be the most anal-retentive GM in baseball, and I can say that, cuz I'm a Mets fan. So, the Amazins now have Mo Vaughn and Jeromy Burnitz and Roger Cedeno and everyone is convinced that we will now score more runs. Hate to break it to you, folks, but we don't have any more power than we did last year, the only difference is Todd Zeile and Robin Ventura and Edgardo Alfonzo all had bad years. If that happens to Mo and Jeromy, it's 3rd place again. The Braves now have Maddux on the shelf, and John Smoltz proved the other night that he is not a closer by giving up 9 in the 9th to New York. By June, he's back in the rotation. It all adds up to a tight race in what could be baseball's deepest division talent-wise. The Phillies are all back, the Marlins are young but dangerous, and even the Expos have the ability to surprise their way into a .500 finish, unless you're one of those conspiracy theorists who think that Major League Baseball is going to force the Expos to trade all their best players in order to help the contraction argument. I'll be optimistic here (I have to be, I haven't been at all to this point) and say the Mets win the division, and the Braves, Phillies, and Marlins duke it out for second and a possible wild-card.

NL Central: The Cardinals are the clear favorite here. They are stacked in the lineup and rotation, even without Big Mac. For anyone to think the Astros have a realistic shot at winning the division, they forget that they are turning into the Colorado Rockies. They'll play a good game at home because they are built to outscore the opposition. On the road, they can't do that, and although they have good young pitchers, it's going to take more than that to get to Billy Wagner, and even he isn't as unstoppable as he used to be. The Cubs have a shot at the playoffs if their pitching rounds into shape. They certainly have the pop in the lineup now that they have Moises Alou to complement McGriff and Sosa. The rest of the division is playing for fourth, and the Reds have to have a healthy Ken Griffey, Jr. in order to get that far. The Brewers have to avoid striking out all the time to finish that high, and the Pirates need to finally show some signs of life.

NL West: No change here from last season, it's still the Diamondbacks and Giants battling for the division. The World Champs have everyone back this year; if they have any negatives at all, it's age. If they don't wear down and get injured like they did in 2000, they'll win the division again. However, if they falter at all, Barry Bonds & co. will be right there to catch them. Bonds won't hit 73 home runs again. First week pace aside, he's 39 years old, and just ask Mark McGwire how tough it is to keep up that pace at that age. The Dodgers will never get it right at this rate; they don't even try to build a winner before they blow the team up and start over. They need a few years for a young homegrown team to jell, but they won't allow that to happen. Meanwhile, the Rockies and Padres provide a legitimate challenge for L.A. for 3rd place, and it could be a long season in LaLa Land if they're stumbling around the cellar into the summer.

AL East: The Yankee$ own this division until I get proof otherwise. The Yankee$ are everything that is wrong with baseball right now. Steinbrenner now has unlimited cash reserves and can buy anyone he wants to keep his team on top. This will not change. Boston's best hope is for a wild-card, which they can get if Pedro Martinez is fully recovered from his injury woes of last year. The new owners may well try a little spending frenzy of their own to match the Yankees, but that may not be the best way to go. Toronto is young, they need a couple of years to put it together; hopefully management will have patience and not look at the empty seats at SkyDome and panic. Tampa Bay's youngsters are finally looking like they could win a few games, and at any rate, they're better than Baltimore. The Orioles will finish dead last, possibly with the worst record in baseball, and Peter Angelos will threaten to sue Bud Selig and Major League Baseball if they try to move a team to Washington. This is what happens when you have lawyers owning baseball teams...

AL Central: This is the Twins year. They surprised everyone last year, but they fell off in the second half. This year, they are expected to contend, but the experiences of last year may be what Minnesota needs to learn how to put together a division winner. Cleveland and Chicago will provide some competition, but the Indians will be lost without Roberto Alomar and the White Sox don't have enough quality starters to match Cleveland and Minnesota down the stretch. Detroit and Kansas City have to deal with the fact that nobody thinks they can win, including their own fans, and try to make something out of nothing.

AL West: It's all about Seattle and Oakland. The Angels and Rangers aren't even close. The Mariners will not win 116 games again, but they may need to win at least 100 to hold off the A's. Oakland loses Jason Isringhausen, they get Billy Koch; they lose Jason Giambi, they bring up Carlos Pena, and all is right with the world. Makes you wonder how many more years they can do this. With Seattle, there are too many players who may have had fluke years last season to think they will run away with the division again, but they can probably beat out Boston or Cleveland for the wild-card if Oakland ends up in first. A Seattle-Oakland ALCS would be a dream matchup like it almost was last year before the Yankees stunned the A's in the first round. Texas and Anaheim have the problem of having to play the Mariners and A's 18 times each. That alone dooms them to .500 at best; the other thing that hurts them is their lack of quality starting pitching.

So there ya have it, and when you think about it, it's pretty much status quo in the bigs this year; the same teams contending. No threat of a team coming out of nowhere like the Twins did last year (except maybe Florida), unlike the NFL where you always have a St. Louis or a Baltimore or a Chicago turn it around in one year. This is why baseball is losing in popularity to football. Do you really think NFL fans would be as into their sport if it was always the same six teams contending? The answer, of course, is no. I hope that the players' union will finally figure this out and accept a salary cap. The outlook, however, is bleak.

So Am I Cool or Not?

I spent the better part of last week flipping through the pages of Rolling Stone's "Cool Issue". Now I, of course, have the belief that we each define what is "cool" for ourselves, and we shouldn't need a popular magazine to tell us. However, I do know that very few people share that same belief, and the people at Rolling Stone certainly wouldn't waste their time with a "Cool Issue" if nobody was going to listen to what they thought was "cool". So, I figured I'd make a few observations about what other people consider "cool".

First of all, I was mortified to find that they considered the year for "Cool Nostalgia" to be 1995. 1995!!! That wasn't very long ago, ya know, but that's not my beef. They can consider last year to be nostalgia and they'd be right, because it's in the past, same as 1995. However, I started 1995 as a high school junior and ended it as a senior. The mere fact that any year that fell while I was in high school is now considered "nostalgia" makes me feel incredibly OLD. Hell, 1995 was my first summer in radio, so this isn't even before I entered my chosen career field; I was working in radio during a year that is considered "nostalgia".

Then, there was the obvious item I was going to criticize, and if you read the "Cool Issue", as soon as you saw it, I'm sure you were thinking, "Oh, Dave's gonna rip that to shreds". Actually, you were probably not thinking of me, but I'm very egotistical like that... anyhoo, it's the fact that Rolling Stone considered Britney Spears to be cool. Sure, they have their "reasons", but it seems to be to read more like an ad for her latest album and it's "not a girl, not yet a woman" subject matter. It may be just because since Ms. Spears (or is it just "Britney" now, as she is rumored to be desiring) is now once again single, the editors of RS (and the male readers) are hoping for any way to attract her attention. At least that disqualifies her and Justin from being eligible for "cool couple". If they had won that, I would've canceled my subscription.

Shameless bow to the TRL generation aside, they do seize on the current shift that is taking place in popular music. The "next big thing" I've been hoping for has turned out to be the return of Indie Rock. The Strokes lead the way; their album sounds like a combination of styles of all the New York bands that paved the way for them, from the Ramones to the Talking Heads to even a splash of Blondie. The current big song from that genre (which unfortunately I can't stand, but that doesn't mean it's not good) is from the White Stripes, a Detroit drum and guitar duo, who depending on who you talk to are either brother and sister or husband and wife (though hopefully not both). If the Strokes are the Clash (a combination of influences), the White Stripes are the Sex Pistols, raw and fast-paced and seemingly lacking much in the way of actual musical talent, but just enough to fool you into thinking they're geniuses. This, by the way, explains the homage to 1995 in this issue of Rolling Stone; that was really the last year you had such a wide array of different styles on rock radio and such a large amount of rock songs crossing over to the pop side of the fence. Flip on a modern rock station (a new phenomenon then), and you would hear Weezer, Elastica, Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Phish, new bands with new sounds. Today, it's Puddle of Mudd, the Strokes, Moby, and Badly Drawn Boy.

As it stands right now, I can finally declare that teen pop is DEAD. Jessica Simpson is stuck with having to get her songs on Bally Total Fitness ads to get any airplay, Mandy Moore has done the right thing (and I what I predicted she would do), and has segued straight into fulltime MTV duty, although she now has a budding career as a movie actress. Britney can't get airplay to save her life, and even though her movie did better than anyone thought, the buzz over that has died too, and less than two months after the release. She's now focusing on opening a restaurant and her breakup with Justin may as well be a microcosm of the crumbling world of teen pop. Justin's own group, 'N Sync, is now rumored to be either broken up or on their way to breaking up, especially with Lance trying (desperately, some might say) to get into space. The Backstreet Boys were done as soon as they started hitting the police blotter and the rehab guestbook, 98 Degrees cashed out with a "greatest hits" album, and not even another pathetic season of "Making the Band" can save O-Town now. In past years, people of my ilk would shudder at the thought of summer approaching, because that usually meant another onslaught of new albums and promo campaigns and wall-to-wall radio exposure, but this year, only Christina Aguilera has a new album coming out, and she waited too long. Most of America now only remembers her as the tramp from the "Lady Marmalade" video and the Grammys, where I still don't think that was actually HER going up to get her award. Memo to Christina: the Marilyn Monroe look only worked for Madonna, and even now I'll bet she regrets trying it.

Then there was the category that only Rolling Stone could come up with, "Things that are so uncool that they are cool", which included, among other things, the Montreal Expos. And rightly so; the Expos (and Minnesota Twins) are the team we hope does well, because they've been given a raw deal. Originally slated for contraction, they are now living on borrowed time as Bud Selig figures out a way to either A) contract them after this year, B) move them to Washington without Peter Angelos suing him to death, or C) merge them with his Milwaukee Brewers in the hopes of finally putting together a decent team. And so, we root for them, even when nobody in Montreal will. Of course in my case, that will be put on hold for the 18 games when they play my Mets.

Finally, there was a list I saw myself guilty of several offenses on, a list that just screamed, "Please, God, in the name of COOL, stop..." which included saying "Am I the only one who..." I think I may be guilty of several instances of that one in this column ALONE! Then there is the fact that I only own 3 of what Rolling Stone says are the 50 coolest albums of all time. On the other hand, I disagree with putting the afore-mentioned White Stripes on this list, but that's the whole point of all this, we each define what is cool. Then again, I'm only one person who writes an online column read by tens at most, and Rolling Stone is a giant magazine empire that reaches millions easily, so I guess I'm throwing pebbles at a brick wall here...