Live from the Red Roof Inn!!!

Yes, friends, the Berlin groundlift of moving nearly everything in an apartment on one side of Tucson to a small hotel room on the other side of Tucson has been completed. I don't think I would have been able to do it without all of my experience in helping Mom with previous lasagna-lifts, so for that I thank her. The room is pretty nice, and we have Internet, so I can't complain too much. We just hope the dogs will keep being good, so we don't get kicked out. 

Notes from the week:

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was on campus this past week and spoke to the students. He was pretty funny and told some good stories. He said his job was basically "doing homework for the rest of his life."

In the interest of keeping it "fair and balanced," I also heard from the Solicitor General of the U.S. Paul Clement. The SG is the designated advocate for the U.S. Government. It is his job to come up with arguments, both legal and otherwise, for what the government does. He was very sharp.

I have been sick. I think it was because I skipped Dr. Keith's fun-time radio half-hour medical hour to hear Breyer and thus was served with flu-like karmic payback. I was really suffering Thursday night, but I'm starting to feel better. 

In the ongoing Mormon basketball league saga, the team upon which I am the sole ringer notched big win number two on the season. However, after a 1-11 regular season, this victory came in the first round of the playoffs. That's right, the slipper still fits, Gus Johnson! We now stand at 2-11 and are looking at a Final Four matchup with a team that humbled us recently. But that doesn't really matter. It was just nice to win again.

I am studying this weekend, however, one small problem with that is that I have cable and it is NBA All-Star Weekend in NOLA, or alternatively the Black Super Bowl or the name I've proposed Mardi Ball. But anyway, I'll definitely be taking in the Saturday night festivities (although I won't be texting in any votes) and the game on Sunday. I'm a bit of a sucker for NBA All-Star Weekend, and the League in general, if you haven't noticed.

In the interest of furthering that suckeritude (word I also made up that is not as good as Mardi Ball), I casually watched the NBA All-Star "Celebrity" game last night on ESPN7. Celebrity was in quotes because the announcers had to tell you what the people did that made them celebrities because no one knew. I had never heard of Ne-Yo before, and I try to pay attention! If you missed it, and I'm sure you did, I can fill you in briefly. A criminally overweight Chris Tucker shot way too much, Prime Time actually played pretty hard and pretty well, Floyd Mayweather likes to dribble, and Taylor Hicks should have stayed home. The only player that would count as a current celebrity, Terrell Owens, showed up at the start of the second quarter (traffic, delayed flight, Tony Romo girlfriend intervention?) and then thoroughly dominated in leading his team to victory. He is good at basketball; the other "celebrities" are not.

I also watched some of the Rookie-Sophomore game but didn't make it to the end because I took some NyQuil and that was that. 

Last cable note: I also have HBO of some sort, it might be HBO2, but anyway I caught some of the preview buildup to Saturday night's rematch bout between Kelly Pavlik and Jermain Taylor. The fight is on PPV, but the show allowed me to see some nice shots of Little Rock, Taylor's hometown. It seemed quite nice. So my final question is for Lloyd, if he has read this far or read at all: Is there a lot of hullabaloo (for lack of a better word about this rematch after Pavlik humbled the hometown boy)? And my other question for him is whether he had heard of Ne-Yo?

Be cool.

Obscure Film Review

Netflix allows me to see movies I have never even heard of. Sometimes this is a good thing. While others times I hadn't heard of the film for a good reason: it wasn't very good. Today's review of a movie I had never heard of before last week is of "The King of Comedy," the least well-known of the Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro collaborations.

The film came out in 1983 - I was 2 - and is about Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) an aspiring comedian with an unhealthy fixation on late-night host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). "King" borrows a bit from Psycho (Pupkin has recreated a set like Langford's in his mother's basement, though it appears his mother is still alive, not a skeleton). In fact, it could be alleged that Seinfeld ripped this film off in the "Merv Griffin Show" episode, but we'll have to save that for another day. Along with Psycho, the film follows the plotlines of many other "perverse fascination/assassination" films where a celebrity is abducted or murdered. After many attempts to have Langford listen to his audition tape, De Niro, who is only somewhat convincing as a down-on-his-luck geek, ends up abducting Lewis and holding him hostage with his release depending on De Niro being able to do his act on that night's show. De Niro does his predictably laughless act (I was born in Clifton, NJ - before that was a federal offense!) and then is arrested. In the interim, a crazy Sandra Bernhard acts crazily crazy in front of her love object Lewis. For this role, it was perfect casting.

De Niro is sent to prison, but when he gets out, he has a bestselling book, lots of comedy work and his face is known worldwide. And while every director whose film doesn't break the box office takes the time in the making-of DVD featurette to say the movie was "ahead of its time" - in this case, when Scorsese says it (and he does, let there be no doubt), it's actually true. Seeing this movie now makes a lot more sense to me than I think it would have to someone my age in 1983. The focus on celebrity is ubiquitous (or at least it seems like it is when you get three channels and they are always showing ET, Access Hollywood or the Emmys).

While movie watchers in 1983 may have been simply disturbed or bored by Rupert Pupkin (Scorsese said Entertainment Weekly called the movie the biggest flop of the year at the time), I think today's celebrity-soaked sycophants would be pulling for him. Pupkin gets his 900 seconds of notoriety (avoid cliches like the plague...whoops!), and I can't help but feel that lots of people would trade places with him, including the stint in prison.

I don't know what this means for me, you, our society, etc. Maybe we aren't better off than we were in 1983, that simpler time of almost a quarter century ago. But I know one thing: DVDs and Netflix didn't exist then, so this conversation probably wouldn't be happening. So although I have to put up with the Britney guy, Mike Patrick, Mike Gundy and sneezing pandas, I don't mind. I'll get by.

Quick obscure film side note: I was reading a book that mentioned a 1978 film called "The Big Fix" starring Richard Dreyfuss. I wish it were on DVD because I've heard it's good. But alas, it is not. I was wondering if some of my...ahem...older readers had possibly seen this film or were aware of it at the time. The book I was reading that mentioned the film excerpted a great line in which Dreyfuss, playing Private Investigator Moses Wine is asked why his arm is broken. His reply is priceless:

"You know, a couple of cops hassling a black kid."