Tag Archives: boring

Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite

I hate it when you go out to a restaurant and all they have to drink is Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. That’s all we serve at my restaurant. The royal triumvirate of boring sodas. It’s like I can just picture whoever started the place, they’re considering all of the locally selected ingredients for each carefully plated dish. And then right after they finish planning the menu, one of them says, “Oh wait, we forgot to go over beverages.”

The other guy goes, “What do you mean, like soda? Just get Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite.” And that’s it. It’s like there’s no imagination at all, not even the possibility that you might branch out even a step into the wider world of soft drinks.

And this isn’t anything against Coke. It’s great. I hate Diet Coke, but whatever, that’s not a fight I’m willing to pick, because people love Diet Coke, and so yeah, not my cup of tea. I do love Coke Classic. But I love cheeseburgers also. It doesn’t mean I want every meal to be a cheeseburger. Nor do I want every drink I have to be a Coke.

I just don’t get it, because there are so many more interesting sodas besides Coke and Sprite. How did we wind up as these two being the standard? It’s like ice cream, you’ve got vanilla and chocolate. Hot drinks, it’s coffee and tea. And for soda, you’ve got whatever flavor Coke is supposed to be and then lemon-lime.

You ever go to a restaurant and ask if they orange soda? Or Mountain Dew? You won’t even get a response right away. The waiter or waitress is just going to stare at you for a little while, to communicate as passive-aggressively as they can, are you kidding me? Are you seriously asking me if we have orange soda or Mountain Dew? Of course we don’t. Of course we only have Coke or Sprite. What the hell is your problem?

I know this because I’m a waiter, and I can’t stand it when people waste my time, “What kind of soft drinks do you have?” And what do I do? I don’t want to be a dick. I don’t want to be like, you’re an idiot, we only have Coke, Diet Coke and Sprite. But that’s all we have. Sure, I can mention unsweetened ice tea, I can throw in seltzer, but that’s it, everybody’s left deflated by the interaction. I don’t know what you were expecting.

But why is artificial orange flavor that much different than artificial lemon and lime flavor? Why is it socially acceptable to have a brown or a clear carbonated beverage in front of you at a restaurant while a green or a neon yellow one would make it look like you snuck out to Pizza Hut to order a soda to bring back to the table?

Cream soda, root beer, grape soda, Dr. Pepper, there are so many alternative soda flavors we could add to the standard restaurant drink menu to make everything more interesting. But no, you’re lucky if you go to a restaurant that has ginger ale.

Every restaurant by me, they proudly serve at least forty-five craft beers on tap. The wine gets its own telephone book sized menu. Bourbons, scotches, spirits, hold on, let me get the liquor manager to come over and give you a history lesson on single malts vs. blends. But soda? We’ve got Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. It’s not fair. I love soda. I would love to have some variety when I feel like enjoying a sugary carbonated beverage.

Hey Bill, are you reading this?

Dear Bill Simmons:

Man, sometimes I feel like I’m never going to get a job at Grantland. Like, I’ll keep writing you these open letters every week, but that’s as far as my one-sided relationship with you is going to go. But I don’t know what else to do. Maybe a year or so ago, I wrote a real letter to you, to Grantland. I went to the web site and went to the “Contact Us” page and there was an email address to the editors. And I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, but it was all professional, like, “Dear editors: This is a very serious inquiry seriously inquiring about writing for Grantland,” blah blah blah.

And look, I know that you probably get way too much email to respond to, I get it. So I’m not mad or anything, it’s not like I take it as a personal snub. But it’s incredibly frustrating, to want something so bad, to want to be a professional writer, just throwing yourself out there on the Internet, over and over again, never getting any sort of response.

It’s like, even these letters, this whatever it is that I’m doing on my blog every week. Dear Bill Simmons: please give me a job. And then I go onto Twitter and tweet you a copy of the link, knowing that you get tons of tweets, that there’s no way you’re able to even view every tweet you receive, let alone consider a response.

But I don’t know what else to do. And it’s you, it’s Gawker, it’s all of these other professional high-trafficked web sites that publish all sorts of cool stories written by authors who, when I click on their profiles, they all look like they’re my age, like it shouldn’t be totally inconceivable that I could be doing what they’re doing.

It’s a tough job, getting a cool job, a job where you get to make stuff and write stuff and somehow earn money from it, enough money that you could theoretically support yourself. So far I think I’ve made about seventeen dollars from my writing. I don’t know how you do it, Bill, how you’ve built this media empire all based on your words, writing about sports, about pop culture, about stuff that you love.

Man, this is a pretty boring letter so far, I’m aware of that. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t think of anything to say right now. Last week I wrote about how I’d start from the bottom and work my way up. That was pretty cool, at least, it was cool in the way that I didn’t really have to think about it as I wrote it. The words just kind of flowed through me from somewhere else.

But right now, man, it’s really a struggle to get these sentences into paragraphs. You must be able to relate, right? I mean, you’ve done it, you’ve made it as a writer. What do you do when you can’t think of anything to write about? I’ve read all sorts of stuff on the topic, and most advice from professional writers always boils down to the inspiration/perspiration argument, that talent is cheap but work is hard.

And yeah, it’s hard to get this letter out there, I don’t know what to say, I’m feeling each week like I’m making a fool out of myself, desperately invoking your name on the Internet, like you’re magically going to swoop down from cyberspace and elevate my status from professional waiter to professional writer.

But isn’t that the kind of guy you want working for you at Grantland? Just think, I’m not afraid of my own self-imposed Internet writing deadlines. I need to write a letter to you every week. Why? I don’t know. I just made up a deadline and ran with it. Can you imagine what I’d do for you? For Grantland? Give me a deadline, and I’ll stick to it. I’ll get something out. I’ll perspire all over the place.

I guess that’s all I’ve got. Not very entertaining, I know, but sometimes you’ve just got to be willing to write something bad in hopes of eventually being able to maybe write something good. In the meantime, please read this letter from last week, the one I was telling you about just before. Also this letter, about a dream I had where you and I both went to space. That was a pretty cool one.

-Rob G.

Bill, I didn’t really enjoy the Super Bowl this year

Dear Bill Simmons:

Did you watch the Super Bowl? Of course you watched the Super Bowl, you’re the Sports Guy, you kind of have to watch the Super Bowl. But did you like it? I didn’t really like it. I think it’s generally acknowledged that the game was boring, an uneven slugfest. Peyton didn’t have any time. The Seahawks defense was too good. Blah, blah, blah, these are all just generic Super Bowl bites that I’m rehashing almost directly from Grantland anyway.

I stole this image from Grantland too. Sorry Bill. I’ll make it up to you once I’m one of your full-time employees.

But aside from the game, did you like the Super Bowl? Like, you’ve made a career out of following sports, writing about sports, so in many ways, this event is like the peak of everything that professional sports strives to be. Or, American professional sports anyway. Because the NFL is pure America, or it strives to be anyway. It more or less exists within the confines of the United States, and judging from the spectacle that was Sunday’s Super Bowl, it’s not a comfortable fit either.

Look at the NFL, and look at NASCAR, its racecar cousin. They’re both basically the same thing. They’re these giant sports that, for the most part, are totally inaccessible to the average American. Anybody can grab a basketball and head to the park for a little pickup, and it’s the same for baseball and soccer. But tackle football? The Daytona 500? You can’t go out and join a pit crew.

I guess you could join a pit crew. But you’d have to make it your job, like that would have to be your whole life. And so, unless you’re committed to climbing that ladder, unless you somehow find a way to coach or play football at some sort of a professional level, you’re really left with whatever the NFL or NASCAR decides to give you.

And, just like most of the writers at Grantland have been pointing out all season, they’re giving us these shows. The NFL has perfected football as an event, as sports entertainment. It’s big, it’s loud, and it’s got something for everyone.

Maybe it would have been OK if there were an actual football game to watch. But the one-sided assault that was Sunday night’s game brought into stark relief what a bunch of nonsense the Super Bowl is as a national event.

Commercials? Like, you have these increasingly rare moments when a large portion of the country turns its attention to the same thing at the same time, and the best we can do is a bunch of advertisements? I don’t care how entertaining you think you’re being trying to sell me Coca-Cola of Bud Light, it’s still a billboard, something that, if I were watching a regular TV show, something that I recorded on my DVR, I’d gladly skip over, one hundred percent of the time.

And I think about other sports, the finals in hockey, baseball, basketball, regardless of how we watch them on TV or follow them on the Internet, it’s all mostly centered around actual sports, fighting for the championship in front of actual fans. Maybe it’s just a natural consequence of the stop-and-go nature of professional football, and yeah, there were plenty of fans visiting New York from Seattle and Denver, but the whole event just felt fake, totally inauthentic. I was more interested in reading about the throngs of out-of-towners getting stuck for hours at some train station in Secaucus than I was in the actual game.

I don’t want to be a downer. But it was just really lame. The commercials were really lame. Yeah it was cool seeing Seinfeld and George act like Seinfeld and George, but was it really that funny? Was that cute puppy and horse Budweiser ad worth me tuning into Channel 5 rather than just clicking play on my computer?

I don’t know. Maybe if the Giants were playing I would have been a little more pumped.

Hey Bill, can I still have a job at Grantland? Please?

Love,

Rob

You call this a circus?

Tightrope walking doesn’t seem that hard. It’s just like a field sobriety test, but on a wire. And, you know, except for that wacko that walked across the Twin Towers in the seventies, there are almost always a few nets underneath to catch you in case you mess up and fall. No, I think tightrope walkers get a lot of unnecessary credit. Theatrics? You call that a performance? Come on, you’re holding a giant balance beam. Again, it’s like nets, balance beams, what else do you want, some sort of gyroscopic stabilizer? You’d have to get up pretty early to sell me any tickets to a tightrope walking show. And then you’d have to duck out of work even earlier, because as soon as I realized what I’d bought, I’d be right back on line looking for a full refund.

And those guys that ride their motorcycles in those enclosed spheres? Please. That’s not a stunt. A stunt would be if the motorcycle was on fire, or if the motorcycles somehow didn’t have any wheels. But three guys on three motorcycles? One, that’s not exciting at all, and two, it’s so loud. Like, I’m watching probably one of the most boring shows on earth, and to top it all off, I’ve got to sit here with my hands covering my ears to show everybody else in attendance just how loud I think it is. Besides, isn’t space-time supposed to be curved anyway? So riding inside a ball should be pretty standard if you ask me.

The clown car? Really? That’s just not safe. How do you train all of those guys to fit in such a tiny vehicle? What if something goes wrong, like what if that car catches on fire before they’re all done with the act? Are you really going to feel good about yourself having watched them all struggle to get out of there, some of them horribly burned, most of them having perished, but not before clawing and elbowing all of their friends in a futile last-minute attempt to escape?

True, the elephants look pretty convincing. But you think about what kind of an elephant lets itself get captured for a circus, I’m thinking it’s got to be the shrimpiest elephants in the herd. No, when I go see a show, I want to see the best. I’m not spending money on easy pickings. It’s like when I buy steak, I don’t want some domesticated cow, no, I want the one the killed the matador with his dying breath.

You call this stuff snacks? I’ve had better popcorn at the movie theater. Way too much salt, not enough butter, you’d think a circus would figure out how to do popcorn, but no, it’s terrible, I want the cotton candy to be fresh, not something out of a plastic bag, and if the vendor guy can’t figure out a way to bring the cotton candy machine along with him, then he might as well switch to candy apples. And come on, is that Pepsi? I hate Pepsi. Who doesn’t sell Coke?

I’m just saying, if you’re going to swallow a whole sword, it kind of defeats the purpose to just pull it back out. Anybody could push a sword down a throat. I mean, I could totally do it. I’m not going to, no, but if I did, I’d make sure to finish it up and wait for it to come out naturally. Yeah, you show me someone who can do that, I’ll call the papers, that’d be a circus. But this clown, and the flame eater guy, one time I was camping and I toasted this marshmallow that caught fire, and I ate it, it was fine, the inside of my mouth was wet and nothing got burnt.

So, no thanks, I don’t want to go to the circus, that sounds really boring. Ask your mother, maybe she’ll take you, but she’s probably tired from watching you run around playing soccer all day. Oh big deal, you scored a goal. You really think it’s that difficult to get a ball past another ten year old? That kid was practically asleep. Who’s coaching you guys? Did any of you even break a sweat?

Movie Review: The Internship

What happens when you make a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy? You get something that resembles the original, kind of, but there’s a definite degradation of quality. You look at your end result, say to yourself, well, everything is where it should be, but it just doesn’t look right. That about sums up The Internship, the wacky summer comedy movie starring two of America’s favorite funny actors, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

We’ve all seen the trailers, there’s nothing that I could possibly spoil for you, even if I wrote out the entire plot of the movie. It’s derivative comedy at its most basic. It’s two guys that don’t know anything about computers that wind up at Google as interns, competing for a handful of full-time jobs.

Get it? Because they’re old. Right? They’re so old. That’s the joke. They keep telling us over and over. “But you guys are so old!” And so Vince Vaughn has a flip phone. And they don’t know how to use computers. It’s like, come on, even my grandfather knows how to use a computer. This trope might have been slightly more believable maybe ten years ago, but by now it’s growing ever more unlikely that there exist a couple of forty year olds living in California that are really this inept in modern technology.

The movie actually starts out funny enough. There are a couple of ridiculous back-and-forths that evoke those old feelings of seeing these two guys in a movie and not automatically assuming that it’s going to suck. But they play their trump card way too early, a signature over-the-top cameo by Will Ferrell, and after that’s come and gone, the movie limps toward the finish line, realizes that it’s way too far away, and decides, whatever, they’ve already paid for the tickets, let’s just call it a day.

These sort-of comedy movies always follow such a formulaic approach to story telling. Characters find themselves in unlikely scenarios, they decide to give it their all, after one or two comical false starts, they rally together, work really hard, and start turning some heads. Of course there’s a bad guy, and of course he winds up getting under the good guys’ skin. There’s self-doubt. Vince Vaughn winds up quitting. But of course he comes back. And of course they rally again just in time.

It was the same in Dodge Ball. It was the same in Old School. It was the same in Wedding Crashers. It’s just over and over and over and over again. Throw in some really cheesy romance. Sprinkle in a scene where everybody goes out to a strip club. I’m sitting there in the theater, not really laughing at all, and I’m just thinking, this is so boring. I can’t believe I’m sitting in this seat being spoon fed the same completely unimaginative garbage summer after summer. Who’s making the money at the end of this gravy train?

To make things even lamer, it’s all a big Google commercial. They talk about Gmail and there’s the Android logo everywhere. Nobody has an iPhone. There’s an almost imperceptible walk-on role by one of the two Google cofounders. When they’re not making funny faces or acting out premature ejaculation jokes, they’re having serious conversations about Google connecting people to people, people to information, making the world a better place.

What else? I’m seriously out of stuff to say about this movie. It was so boring. I can’t believe I actually spent money to go see it. This is something that normally I’d only ever watch if I were on a really long vacation with my entire extended family, and during one of those weird in-between points, when everybody’s asleep or waiting for dinner, and we’re all just kind of hanging around the one TV wherever we’re at, and TBS is playing a “very funny!” movie, and we’re all like, The Internship, huh, we all forgot that this movie ever even came out. And we watch it, it’s terrible, but nobody makes a move to turn it off, and everybody’s a little bit more tired having had to sit through such unfunny two hours of their life.

Man, I’m so tired. I hate having to so thoroughly bash something. But what a joke. An unfunny joke. There’s nothing else to say. I’m really sad and tired now.