Spencer Hall’s Google Reader Account and Turntable Room

Here are a few things I did in 2015.

1. A review of the working dogs group in the Westminster Dog Show. It is the best group, and also not coincidentally the group most capable of dragging you off a cliff to your demise without an ounce of remorse. I can write about dogs for the rest of my life.

Texted My Dad/Reno Kidney Scam

Watchin’ Invisible Television

My brother was being born and I got to hang out with Dad. Hanging out with Dad meant all the great things about being taken care of by a dad who had no domestic capabilities whatsoever. We ate fast food breakfast every morning, watched laundry pile up in the corners of the house and enjoyed a decided negligence of bedtimes because my dad did not understand how to take care of us, much less himself. He regarded sleep like an untreatable tropical disease: He had it, and from time to time it made him pass out for a while until he recovered.

We ate the cheap, generic-brand, knock-off cereal in bags when Dad was in charge. We also got to watch Letterman. The first night I watched Letterman I was 6 years old. The host looked like he’d loitered in from some other show: He was irritable, rarely looked directly at the camera and wore tennis shoes and jeans with his suit. When he did look in the camera, even 6-year-old me recognized what this was. This show was a total fucking disaster, right down to the long pauses, obvious, got-nothin’ time killers, and half-speed interviews with celebrities often horrified by the thought they’d shown up to the wrong place.

You travel as the concierge to narcoleptic, emotionally unstable, untitled aristocrats. Every vacation with children is escorting King George III on his daily routine. King George III was the jerk king with porphyria who, when ill, took to sudden flights of fancy, argued with everyone in sight over absolutely nothing, and occasionally just had to lie down for a while when it all got to be too much.

This is traveling with two children five and under to Disney World. Someone will cry. Someone will make insane demands. Someone will want mounds of overpriced plastic crap. If they do not get it, there will be emotions, and someone will wind up weeping on the floor until you distract them with something else. I recommend a promise of “More and different overpriced plastic crap around the corner.” It works every time as long as you do this until they fall asleep, and may be removed unconscious from the park without protest.

There’s a thing in dramas where, in order to humanize an invincible character, the writers take away the primary thing the character does. The character then turns to something else, something they are generally bad at, thus making them appear mortal, and at times even pitiable. Think of Hank in Breaking Bad when he’s holed up after his shooting with his minerals, or maybe the time Ben in Parks and Recreation decides to try stop-motion animation.

This is that moment for Drew Brees. He’s not in the playoffs. He’s clearly just knocking around the house: bored, aimless, staring at a pantry full of Advocare products, and wondering what there is to do in life besides throw a ball for money. He makes breakfast, and then -- like a post pattern over the rush of a cover 0 blitz, inspiration:

I wrote the following stuff this year that I didn’t totally hate.

First, putting Reese’s Mini Cups on top is buying alcohol in tiny bottles when what you want is a handle of gin. You are not making an elevated, principled argument about proper chocolate-to-peanut-butter ratios. You are not performing delicate chemistry, or sounding like a gourmand getting fubsy with your peanut butter and chocolate candy requirements. Reese’s Mini Cups are packaged in three things: paper, foil, and denial. “I just eat one,” says a liar who ate twenty-two of them in a sitting when two or three regular Reese’s Cups would have done.

Mini Cups are LIES. Reese’s Cups are the fatty, insulin-spiking power of whole, unminiaturized truth.

1. Centennial Park in Atlanta is the Olympic Park, so there is a statue of Pierre de Coubertin, half-stepping onto a set of steps and looking through Greek pillars and out to the east across the park. For three nights of shows, Pierre stared directly at the Outkast stage. He was draped with every manner of Atlantan at one point or another: men smoking weed in the open wearing old Braves jerseys, bearded East Atlanta bartenders in trucker hats holding tall boys of Heineken, what appeared to be a very, very intoxicated Jugalette in an Ed Hardy shirt and half of grown, folk-aged East Point on dates with their wives, leaning out and taking properly tagged Instagram selfies they hoped would end up on the big screens set up around the quad.

2. Some people got babysitters for Outkast. Some didn’t even bother. A man pushing a stroller had his baby at the show. I looked in casually while walking by for a beer: the child was sound asleep. He bobbed up and down next to the stroller and stayed for the entire show. Some didn’t need babysitters at all, like the two older ladies in country club gear next to me who appeared to have mistakenly wandered over from the Garth show. They had not, and knew most of the words to “Elevators.”

1. I don’t know how all four people were allowed to assemble in the same place, since there should have been some national security argument against having Weird Al, James Brown, Little Richard, and Lee Greenwood under the same roof. A single accident of nature could have wiped them all out, and reduced America’s vital parody music and patriotic anthem reheating capacity to nothing. James Brown is wearing some blue alien fabric that would have protected him from any assault, attack, or disaster, though. He’d be just fine.

2. James Brown solves a puzzle successfully! It is not without struggle, and not without instantly thinking of this quote from Phillip Gourevitch’s New Yorker profile “Mr. Brown.”

You can’t embed it, so you will have to watch Alan Thicke wearing the shortest shorts a forty-year-old man has ever worn in a 1992 commercial for youth soccer over on Youtube.

There you will discover these delights:

1. We’re kind of playing a loose 4-2-3-1 here, if you’re wondering about the formation.

2. Starting in goal, we needed length and athleticism. At around 6’5” and with a not insubstantial high school basketball career to his credit, 2 Chainz will more than do as a kind of Hakeem Olajuwon-in-reverse project.

The Atlantic made a 22 minute documentary about the 2014 Barkley Marathon, a forbidding ultramarathon run through hellaciously hilly Morgan County, Tennessee. It only took the sole finisher in the documentary fifty hours to collapse, nearly give up, and then notice the waving of the tree branches in the wind, but bloody feet and physical annihilation are a small price to pay to star in your own Terence Malick movie in the freezing woods of East Tennessee.

P.S. Bonus points for showing the race’s founder firing up a cigarette the minute the starting bell goes off.

1. John Oliver’s gotten really, really good at his job really, really quickly. Everyone will watch this today, and then share it on your social media platform of choice with “WATCH JOHN OLIVER SHRED FIFA LOL”, and you’ll miss the central and most painful point of this. FIFA is a horrible institution, a toxic cauldron poisoning the soul-warming flame of soccer itself. It’s not just that John Oliver can do the Jon Stewart thing you’re so fond of hitting the like button on, but it’s the deft hand pointing you towards something so much worse that makes Oliver remarkable here: that you’ll still watch, because for all its faults something in you and billions of other people still feeds off something in the game, something that enables FIFA despite your best critical instincts. Take that in as evidence of his skill, or hell, just hit the little “Share” button and type LOL. Whether you notice it or not, John Oliver’s doing something remarkable here, something broadly applicable to any sports fan struggling with a beloved game that might be in some very filthy custodial hands. (CC: everyone, pretty much.)

2. There actually is a movie about FIFA. Its title is “United Passions,” and in case you wonder what narcissistic managerial drones would create a film about corrupt sporting kleptocrats, your answer is simple: the narcissistic managerial bribe-guzzlers at FIFA. They spent $27 million of FIFA’s “non-profit” money on the film, and did not even attempt to cover up Sepp Blatter’s only remarkable skill as a person in the trailer. (“He is good at finding money.”)

1. I was in line for groceries on the late night dad beat last week and these very dull visitors from somewhere not here were speaking in flat, monotonous accents about their church group. I want to make that part up, but I can’t. They were talking about their church group, and buying batteries for their digital cameras for whatever event they were going to in town, and then they saw the cover of People featuring Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.

Woman one: “Oh, I don’t like him. I don’t like him at all.”

A few notes on this analysis of Google Trends:

1. This is a deeply unflattering infographic about America. By rule, it must be shared with everyone on the Internet.

If you’re going to do it right, don’t do it by making Nashville first, or ever ahead of Memphis. It’s like we have to tell you how to do this, Travel and Leisure, since you made such a hash of your list you put Kansas City ahead of Austin, an act of such naked madness you’d be jailed in another century for even saying it. You wanna know how to do it properly, T&L?

You name the best fifty barbecue joints in the world and don’t name a single one outside the state of Texas.

The World Cup is an excuse to enjoy a lot of things, but as any ESPN commercial will show you, it is impossible to separate any invocation of Brazil from its music. In my case, it’s Banda Black Rio, best thought of as the pre-J.T. Kool and the Gang of Brazilian funk.