To Twitter or Not to Twitter

All right, I get it. Twitter is the "next big thing" in personal media. My friends are quickly jumping on the bandwagon, certain radio idols of mine are twittering, so am I expected to join the masses as well?

If you're not familiar with Twitter, it looks to me like a cross between extremely-short form blogging and updating your Facebook status. You write whatever is on your mind in three lines or less. Well, if you've read this blog, you know damn well that I am completely incapable of limiting my thoughts to three lines or less. I don't do bite-sized. Here's how I generally come up with a blog entry: something happens that either tweaks my interest or pisses me off. If I don't have time at that moment to blog about it (which is usually the case), I leave a note for myself to write about it at a later date. The next free moment that I get, I sit down, start writing, make sure I get all the relevant points I want to make out there, digress several times, somehow manage to get back to the original topic, END. If the creative juices are truly flowing, I can crank one out in 45 minutes.

In terms of sheer content, if I were to twitter... or become a twitterer... or tweet... or whatever the hell it means to use the stupid thing... I would probably put about as much in a week as I do in an average blog entry, only it would be three lines at a time, and instead of a nice long treatise on the president's health care plan, it would be 20 posts about things like the status of my NCAA bracket or the new "This is SportsCenter" commercial. Also I feel like it would be redundant to, say, write a quick blast about Oliver Perez's WBC misadventures and then write up a full baseball preview (coming soon) that included my Ollie take. I feel like I would just get lazy, take the easy Twitter way out and never blog again.

Seriously, you don't need to hear from me 8 times a day. I don't need to hear from me 8 times a day. Maybe I'll just follow other people who don't confine their thoughts to their Facebook status... or I'll sign up for Twitter, follow people for a week, and then forget about it. At least then I can say I tried, right?

Speaking of wondering if I need to have something... the new "special edition" of Pearl Jam's debut CD "Ten" came out this week. Pearl Jam is one of my all-time favorite bands; "Ten" is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock. It would be nice to have all the extras, such as the additional tracks and the DVD of the band's 1992 "MTV Unplugged" appearance. However, if I were to get this, I would still have essentially two copies of the same CD. I see no reason to get rid of my original copy, which has more collector's value. I'm sure many people who are much more obsessive fans than I am over something like this will go out and buy the special edition, but I think my $27.99 could probably be spent better elsewhere.

And finally... SU went down in the Sweet 16 last night. Yes, I picked them to beat Oklahoma (for entertainment purposes only, of course), as did President Obama, which may well have provided the Sooners with extra motivation to beat us. All in all though, you have to be happy with the way the SU season went. A month ago, the Orange was on the bubble, and they pulled off an unforgettable 9-1 stretch that included the 6-overtime classic against UConn in the Big East Tournament, and a run to the Sweet 16 is better than losing in the NIT quarterfinals any day of the week. So for the next few days, please indulge the morons who will lay this loss completely at the feet of our Hall of Fame head coach and plead for his imminent retirement. Jim Boeheim isn't going anywhere, and we need to be reminded once again of how good we have things here in Syracuse. We've won 20 games or more 30 times in Boeheim's 33 years, a record for any college basketball coach. We've made the postseason in every year we were eligible, and usually it's been the NCAAs.

Now apparently, Myopic Syracuse Fan would gladly trade some of those 20-win seasons (which they are convinced are inflated by wins over creampuffs) for a couple more Final Fours and another national championship or two. They would rather have a record like Duke or North Carolina, which both had bottoming-out periods and losing seasons between championship runs in the last 20 years. No thanks. I'll take a consistent winner and excitement every March over the occasional 13-18 any day of the week. Most college programs would kill for the standard we've set of not having a single losing season in nearly 40 years. We should be even better next year, provided our star players stay for one more year. No reason for cynicism. I'll even accept the occasional unfortunate back page headlines, because if we are going to be "New York's College Team", like Dr. Gross wants us to be, we're gonna have to deal with the New York media, so that's okay. Better to be flambeed on the back page of the New York Post than never to show up there at all.

And now that I have once again proven that my mind works in too grandiose a way to be contained within a twittering... or tweet... or whatever... I think I'll stick with what works.

The End-of-Decade Blues

Is it just me, or has music really sucked lately?

Actually, I know for a fact that it is not me (this time). I've been talking to a lot of people lately for my thesis research, and the opinion is nearly unanimous. In the words of Billy Joel, "Music she ain't what she used to be." We seem to be suffering the same malady in the current pop music scene that has affected Hollywood: a total and disturbing lack of original ideas. Turn on the radio right now and you hear a lot of the same that we've heard the last few years. Another knock-off emo band, another song trying to teach you a new dance; even when the names change, the beat still sounds the same.

Worse yet, we have bands and artists continuing to poach whatever bygone hit songs they can get their hands on for their own uses, and apparently it's become slim pickings. How else can you explain the hard rock band Seether covering "Careless Whisper" by Wham? I mean, this is a joke, right? A tongue-in-cheek thing, like Alanis Morissette covering "My Humps", right? Oh wait, you're doing this song seriously? Dude...

That about sums up my reaction when I hear that song. I cannot take it seriously. Funny thing is I haven't been able to change the station when it comes on. It's like a car wreck; you really shouldn't look at it, but you rubberneck, you take your time looking at it. Then aside from Seether covering Wham, you have Flo Rida openly swiping the hook from Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round and Round" (like anyone who lived through the 80s wouldn't have caught that), and Kelly Clarkson apparently plagiarizing herself from two albums ago.

So yeah, there's a lot of the same old thing going around these days. When we think the biggest things to look forward to in rock are the new U2 and Green Day albums, you want to get excited but then you realize these bands have both been around for a LONG time. Nothing against U2 and Green Day, I like both of them, but can't anyone else rise to their level right now? The best we get is Nickelback. Dear god... these guys can't go away fast enough. This is why young adults aren't listening to radio anymore, because at any time of day, I could scan the 6 presets on my car radio's FM1 band and Nickelback could be on 5 of them (the 6th is a classic rock station). And we can recycle Kid Rock because he managed to destroy "Werewolves of London" and "Sweet Home Alabama" in the same song, but we can't play anything from the new Blues Traveler album? Is there really a rule that says, "Only bring back a group if anybody with taste can't stand them?" How else do you explain the New Kids on the Block revival?

Here's my personal barometer that tells me how bad music is getting... I download the songs that I really like from each year and make them into mix CDs summing up that particular year. Those CDs and certain songs can remind me of certain things that happened that year. This year, so far, has been pretty light as far as songs I saw fit to download and hang onto at this point. Actually, I should say it has been pretty "lite"... as in the music itself has been pretty down and depressing. Don't get me wrong, I like a good lush and moody arrangement once in a while, but when your current playlist goes from a rare Offspring ballad to Coldplay to Death Cab to a not-quite-rocking U2 song... I start to wonder if I'm really depressed and don't realize it or if that's just where the decent music is now.

We seem to be heading into a "doldrums" period in music. Permit me to explain: radio consultant and Top 40 guru Guy Zapoleon once came up with the idea that pop music goes in cycles. When things are down, there will inevitably be a "rebirth" with a lot of good rock and R&B music, followed by a period of "extremes" where things get a little out of control, and then it all implodes and we're left with in the "doldrums" of lite rock and music that we will one day look back at and laugh. Doldrums periods made stars out of people like Gilbert O'Sullivan, Christopher Cross, and Nelson. Now do you see why I'm a little bit concerned?

I want to be happy that Eminem came back, because he's one of the few who can save us from crappy music, but we can't just rely on him to crank out a new album every time music starts to go downhill. A lot of the blame falls on radio programmers afraid to take chances, record companies afraid to take chances, and well, the people who just aren't willing to listen anymore. There is a big disconnect right now: the people have their own favorite artists, and once in a while, the machine gets it right and plays them. Most of the time, however, they stay underground until they come forth with the big "radio hit", and then it may be good for the artist in the short-term because it gives them a top-selling album, but it does permanent damage because their fans deem them to have sold out and stop listening to them. Eventually, the band or artist returns to that which made their original fans like them in the first place, but only after they can't sell albums with radio hits anymore.

What's the solution? I think a lot of our troubles go back to when music stations stopped listening to the people (remember the old music surveys you could fill out in your favorite record store?), and started listening to the consultants tell them what the hits are. I find it hilarious that stations keep the consultants on retainer with their big contracts and justify the expense by dumping the live DJs and replacing them with voice-tracking. Reversing the process is the only way to fix this, but it would take an entire collapse of the radio industry as we know it today for that to happen.

Or we just sit and wait for the next rebirth. That's all we may be able to do at this point. Enjoy the doldrums, people...

Kids Won't Like This One

President Obama this week expressed his support for an idea that has been tossed around quite a bit in recent years. He would like to see either the school day or the school year extended in the hopes of making our students more competitive with those of other nations. He specifically brought up the fact that South Korean students are in school for a month longer than our students. He also would like to see merit pay for good teachers, something Republicans have supported for years and naturally the unions have opposed. Those of us looking for bipartisanship are pretty happy about Obama's plan in that regard.

There has certainly been concern since No Child Left Behind was passed that teachers spend too much time "teaching to the test" and not enough time making sure the students are actually learning what they need to learn in order to be successful in life. And it's an oft-repeated fact that American children are lagging far behind those of other nations when it comes to reading, math, and science. Extending the school year won't necessarily fix the institutional problems in our education system, but at the basic level, it may be a help.

It would also go a long way toward fixing another recent problem with our children: obesity. The trend has been blamed partially on the lack of physical education in schools. Recess has been getting eliminated nationwide, replaced by mandatory PE in some cases. That makes no sense to me... what do kids mostly do during recess most of the year? They play, they run around and play and have fun. This is getting replaced by mandatory games run by a gym teacher, and besides the fact that some kids might not want to play whatever the teacher wants, studies have shown that some free time on the playground helps kids with ADD/ADHD. Why can't we do both and still have time for all the subjects? A longer school year could accomplish that because you would have more time to teach everything. This is truly a win-win for teachers and kids... that is, once we got the kids to accept having to go to school longer.

Which reminds us that of course this longer school year idea doesn't come without its problems. Obama referred to the fact that our present school calendar comes from a bygone era where children were needed on the farm to tend to the fields and the crops come summer time so they got the summer off. That may be true, but as America progressed and advanced through the last century, new traditions emerged that made our school year just as sensible. Our nation's vacation and tourism industry pretty much relies on the kids being off for the summer. There's also the issue of being at school during the summer heat waves. Being from New York, I went to school later in the year than most kids in this country. We had our finals in mid-June, and let me tell you there is nothing like being in a sweltering hot gymnasium taking your Regents exams with a couple hundred other students and only strategically-placed fans in each corner to keep you cool. They're gonna have to find a way to keep everyone from suffering heat stroke before they can really make this happen.

My biggest concern from all this talk of a longer school year is the fact that this will inevitably cost more money. The schools already operate almost year-round in some capacity, because they need janitorial staff and teachers for summer school, but now you'll need to keep cafeteria workers on for longer, and of course teachers may want more money in exchange for giving up part of the summer vacation that THEY love just as much as their students do. At a time where we already are suffering trillion-dollar deficits, how do we pay for this?

Now I know all the kiddies look at this as adults who don't have to go to school anymore who have forgotten what it was like to "suffer" in our K-12 education system... and they're right. If I was a kid, I probably wouldn't like this. But as parents like to say, "We're doing this for your own good." I'm sure they'll enjoy getting their recess back and playing sports... unless their gym teacher tries to do a unit on tai chi with them like mine did. Stroke the peacock's tail... Anyway, I'm all for anything that will make our students and our country more competitive in the world, so bravo to President Obama and I hope he can make this happen... along with the eleventy billion other things he's trying to accomplish all at once.

I'm On Break...

Not as in a break from this blog (although I am known to do that from time to time... like for nearly 4 years in one instance), but Spring Break. That of course is a misnomer in my part of the world, where the week of Spring Break usually doesn't pass without some amount of snowfall. Anyway, I get a few days to recharge and let my mind wander, to think about those things which slip my mind while I am in the midst of academia. Things like: How the hell did Miley Cyrus find time to write a BOOK? Or who thought that "Gimme that Filet o' Fish" commercial was anything but goddamn annoying?

Mostly I've been interested in the World Baseball Classic lately. It's a nice reminder that the new baseball season is fast approaching, and today I plunked down for my tickets to a Mets game at the sparkling new Citi Field (a.k.a. Federal Government Field, since our tax dollars are pretty much paying for the naming rights now, not to mention K-Rod's salary). Of course it's not the biggest thing going on in sports right now, as we approach the NCAA Tournament (which Syracuse will finally be back in this year), and the home stretch of the NHL season with my Buffalo Sabres in position to once again miss the playoffs if they don't start winning immediately.

This World Baseball Classic was created a few years ago to run every 3 years and give us all a chance to see the best talent from around the world, talent that doesn't necessarily have to or want to play in the major leagues. In the case of teams like Italy and South Africa, it's because most of their players aren't good enough; in the case of the Japanese and Koreans, it's because most of them are content to play in their own high-quality leagues; in the case of the Cubans, it's because they'd have to defect. Still, it's a great concept for the sport, a combination of the Olympics (which recently dropped baseball) with the excitement of October, all before the regular season even begins.

It also gives us fantasy baseball players the opportunity to scout potential draft-day steals, because if some previously unknown Mexican player can take the best pitcher from the Dominican deep in the World Classic, it's pretty likely he can do it on a regular basis in the majors. The trade-off is you especially want to be wary of pitchers in this tournament. Three years ago when they first did this event, half the pitchers who took part got injured or proved otherwise ineffective not very long into the regular season because they were already overworked. This year, they're trying to minimize that by having the starting pitchers do their usual 4-5 innings that they would be up to at this point in exhibition games, but you still have to wonder with the pressure of the moment.

And the pressure, of course, is mostly on the United States. This is because the first time around, we thought we would dominate. After all, baseball is OUR national pastime, so this should be easy, right? Then we lost to CANADA in pool play in the opening round. Then we didn't even make the semifinals. Oops. So this time, we're expected to do well, and we have in the early going, surviving yet another scare from our neighbors to the north (although to be fair, the game was in Toronto) and blowing out Venezuela.

The attention being paid to the World Classic may not be quite as big in the States as it is in other countries, but that's okay. It's fun to see the other countries get up for this tournament because they care about baseball just as much as we do, if not more. And although some of these countries have to borrow players from us to field legit rosters (like the Italians who had Mike Piazza catching for them in 2006), it's cool to see them give it a good try. And even though much of the Netherlands team has never heard of wooden shoes (being from the Dutch-controlled Curacao and Aruba), it was still pretty awesome to see them upset the heavily-favored Dominicans the other day. But then it seems like other countries get more up for international competitions than we do most of the time (World Cup, anyone?) We only care about the Olympics from force of habit. Every 4 years, it's there, just like presidential elections (and the same year, conveniently).

The World Baseball Classic will go to every 4 years as well after this year's edition, so maybe we have to give this a few go-rounds before Americans get into it as well. But for my money, it beats the latest version of American Idol or Celebrity Apprentice. I mean I'm on downtime right now, but I'm not completely brain-dead...

How Much Is Too Much?

I was in Philadelphia last week for a couple days. As I drove around the area, I naturally wanted to hear what the local radio stations had to offer. I landed on WXPN, the college station at Penn, during their "Y-Rock" show. This is the last remnants of what was once Y-100, Philly's alternative rock station. The alt-rock format has fallen on hard times in recent years, not for lack of audience, but for lack of effort to reach them. But I could spend a whole entry (or six) on what's gone wrong with radio in the last several years...

Anyway, Y-Rock is not only its own nightly show, but also its own HD subchannel on WXPN's signal. HD Radio is the latest expansion of options for radio listeners, but it carries a pretty steep price tag and it's much easier to get a satellite receiver in your car at this point. Hopefully, that will change. So as I listened to Y-Rock, I was blown away by the wide variety of songs and artists, known, unknown, and forgotten, that I was hearing. And I thought that I would love to get a lot of the music that I was listening to. But that reminded me of one thing... I already have a TON of music.

I wasn't much of a music collector until the end of high school/beginning of college. Even then, I was a poor college student and didn't get all that many CDs during those years. Certainly, not as many as my senior year roommate, who was music director at the college radio station. He had over 500. Then, Napster hit. Until using the P2P sites put you at risk of a lawsuit, I downloaded freely and often, but I also bought a lot more CDs. By the time I moved to Chambersburg, Pah in 2001, my CD count was over 100, and I had a lot of MP3s, both of the ripped and "shared" variety on my computer. Then I worked in music radio, and that allows you to hear a lot of new music and then I was a music director, which meant I heard even more, and I continued buying, and since my move back here to Syracuse, I've bought more and more. Then, I started downloading legally and paying for it on iTunes, and developed a nice $3 a week habit with that site. Yeah, it adds up, but I figured that was about what I was paying in CD purchases anyway.

Fast-forward to 2009. I now have well over 300 CDs, counting burned mix CDs and comedy CDs, and over 2000 songs on my computer. When the recession hit, one of the first things I cut back on was buying CDs. I've bought one this year, the new Blues Traveler one (worth it, by the way), but I'm still downloading from iTunes. One day recently, I was listening to music on my iTunes player, and it occurred to me that in the 18 months I have owned this laptop, there are songs that I have not listened to. At all. And they're good songs. Maybe I've heard some of them on the radio during that time, but that doesn't count for these purposes. Now it's like I have them just to have them. Certainly, listening to 2000 songs, one right after another, would take quite a while (5.7 days to be exact), and then there's the small matter of those 300-plus CDs. When the hell do I have time to listen to those? I'll bet I haven't heard some of them in years, as my favorite tracks from those CDs were ripped to become part of the 2000-plus songs I have in my computer.

And then there's all the books I have. I've accumulated them over the years from various places. When I was a kid, I loved to go to the used bookstore on the North Side, just cuz I'm into old stuff like that. I used to read for reasons other than academic ones (I miss those days sometimes). And now I'm saving books from classes that I feel will be helpful to me, so I guess that's good, but when am I ever going to have practical use for a 1991 Sports Almanac (and no, McFly, it's not a Grays Sports Almanac)? I have a ton of VCR tapes I will never watch (and I still record things!) I have a PlayStation One gathering dust and games I will likely never play again. And don't get me started on the boxes of useless stuff I have accumulated from various sporting events and such I have attended over the years... while I may be a packrat, at least I'm an organized one...

I've heard suggestions that I sell back my used CDs and I know people who have done that, used books too... but it's MY STUFF! Ya know, the late George Carlin had it right when he said that our dwelling places, be they apartments or houses, are really just oversized compartments for storing all of our stuff. And now we're in an economic downturn and the only way we can get out of this mess is, essentially, to buy more stuff.

Now don't get me wrong, I am very much pro-capitalist and I understand that buying stuff (otherwise known as goods and services) makes the world go round. But it just seems like we are overwhelmed by all the stuff we already have. Thanks to the Internet, we can watch any number of television shows that have been off the air for years (for that matter, you can do that on cable, but the Internet is on demand). Or you buy these things on DVD... have I mentioned that I also have a lot of DVD movies that I have NEVER watched? And of course we have more new stuff coming out all the time.

I guess if there's any comfort I can take right now, it's the fact that a lot of the new stuff SUCKS. New music, new movies, etc. If I have to be more choosy, I guess when you look at the cycles of pop culture, now is the time to do it.

Meanwhile, does anyone want to buy a used copy of Nerf Herder's first CD?