Belligerent in Beantown

Saw Ben Affleck’s new movie, The Town, last week.  It was good.  Really good.  Like, scary good.  It was one James Earl Jones cameo and one Scarlett Johansson bikini scene away from becoming my favorite movie of all time.  Seriously, it was that good.

What it lacked in two-pieces, and guys who sound like Darth Vader/Mufasa, The Town more than made up for with my other action movie essentials including, but not limited to: depictions of armed robbery, nun masks, a car chase involving a minivan, Boston accents, John Hamm, and one of those interrogation scenes where the cops are really letting the criminal have it and they’re telling him how he’s gonna go to jail forever cause his friends have already ratted him out and how he better confess or they’re gonna give him the chair and right when you think the perp’s about to crack he leans back in his chair, smiles, and tells the cops to go eff themselves and you realize that they got nothing on him and he’s totally gonna get away with it.  I love that.

There’s a lot to love about The Town, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.  I’m here to share a thought I had while watching the movie.  The thought was this: why is it that movies set in Boston always make the city out to be a terrible place filled with equally terrible people?

I’ve never been to Boston.  But I would like to check it out someday.  It seems like a nice enough place and my friends who hail from there have nothing but great things to say about it (usually involving the adjective “wicked”).  By all accounts Beantown is a beautiful place.  But there’s a different story being told at the movie theater.

Me and Tom Brady’s Wife: A Word on Fantasy Football

Can I talk to you for a few minutes about fantasy football?  It isn’t often that I use the words “fantasy” and “football” in the same sentence, and when I do it usually has something to do with Tom Brady’s wife.  Not so in this case.  Those of you who know about the internet have probably already guessed that the fantasy football I’m talking about today is the kind where people form leagues, assemble teams made up of NFL players, and then compete against other teams in their league while accruing points based on the weekly performance of the NFL players on their team.  It is every bit as nerdy as it sounds.

Fantasy football represents the latest in a long history of things created by nerds which were then appropriated by normal people to use as we see fit.  Facebook, pop rocks, and Death Cab for Cutie are a few other examples.  Whereas fantasy football was once the realm of people who were bored with Dungeons and Dragons yet still confused by human interaction, it has now been embraced as an acceptable leisure activity by whole legions of men who occasionally speak to women and have never seen Tron.  Even more surprising are the scores of young women – Dakota Fanning and Malia Obama among them – who have joined fantasy leagues, though it is speculated that most have only done so in order to have an explanation for their repeated Google searches for “Mark Sanchez + fantasy.”

Since fantasy football is both mainstream and divorced from reality you may have already guessed that I am an enthusiastic participant.  In fact, having enjoyed a modicum of success in a league last year, I made the questionable decision to join two leagues this year.  This pretty well guarantees I will spend more hours of my week thinking about fantasy football than I spend on, for example, sleeping.  And in no way is that depressing.  I look at fantasy football the way I look at eating a Double Down from KFC: probably not the healthiest addition to my life, but a damn good time while it’s happening.

WTF, California!?

Talk to just about anyone who lives in California and who is not running for public office and you are likely to find a person with a conflicted relationship with their state of residence.  This is because California is the state equivalent of the Gosselin family: gigantic, entertaining, attractive in parts, and cataclysmically dysfunctional.

On the one hand, you live closer to pretty places and pretty people than 95% of Americans.  On the other hand, you are 95% more likely to know a Raiders or Lakers fans than the average American.  On the one hand, you can go entire fiscal quarters without seeing a cloud.  On the other hand, you are governed by people who don’t know what a fiscal quarter is.

As a reluctant transplant to the west coast, I am absolutely and unashamedly a member of the abovementioned “conflicted majority.”  There are times, like when I’m at the Shamu show at Sea World, that I love it.  But there are other times, like when I look at my pay stub, that I hate it.  And there are still other times, like when I hear Katy Perry singing about the girls here, when I hate myself for loving it.

This new, semi-regular FMA feature will focus on the latter two events.  It will highlight the several dozen moments in any given week when I am forced to ask, “WTF, California?” and promise myself that I’ll move at the earliest opportunity.  You want to feel good about California?  Watch Entourage or listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  You want to know why you should never, ever, for any reason, girl, job, or dream move here?  Read on.