The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

My homeboy, Chris Chaberski, has started a blog. He started it about a month ago and I didn't realize it until today. I guess I've been working too hard.

Once this post disappears you can use the sidebar link to go to Calmer Than You Are any time you please.

There are some things in my life that need to be in order that I'm guessing don't really bother most other people. I'm also guessing that there are some things in people's lives that need to be in order for them that don't bother me and that I probably don't even notice. Here's an example of something that I'm anal about.

When I'm driving and it starts to rain, I'm overly conscious of the level of my intermittent wipers. I feel the need to match the intermittency with the level of rain. Obviously if the wipers are going too slow then I won't be able to see out of the windshield, but I can't have them going to fast, either. If there's not enough rain being wiped away between passes, then I slow down the wipers to whatever I determine to be the perfect speed. If it's not raining hard enough for the slowest speed to be acceptable, then I'll turn the wipers off and manually turn them on and off again when the level of rain on the windshield warrants it.

I'm almost certain that most people don't think about this as much as I do. Most of the things that I dwell on relate to efficiency in one way or another. I feel it's inefficient for the wipers to go too fast, for example.

Probably if I dwell on something I don't really even notice it. The only reason I noticed the windshield wiper thing was because I was driving in someone else's car and he just turned the wipers on continuously even though it wasn't raining hard enough to warrant that type of wiping. It bothered me to an extent that was most likely unwarranted. It's not debilitating in any way, I didn't mention it in the car, I just noticed it again and again.

What are some other things people dwell on? Anyone feel like sharing?

For some reason the text won't appear next to the side menu. I've been messing around with it with no success. I may change the template so if the blog looks different, now you know why.

I am prone to hyperbole, but I am not being facetious when I say that I am certain I would have been a better general manager for the Knicks than Scott Layden and Isiah Thomas have been over the past 6-7 years.

Kurt Thomas was the only player the Knicks could conceivable trade. He's the only guy anyone would want and he's the only guy who's not ridiculously overpaid on their team. He's overpaid, yes, but not ridiculously. He's been their most consistent player for 5 years now at least and he's just a solid guy. Kurt's got 12 and 10 every night more or less for the Knicks and he was their best post defender.

It was obvious that they would trade him because they're under the guise or rebuilding or reloading or whatever the hell they say they're doing. There is no bigger Kurt Thomas fan than me, but even I knew he had to go since the Knicks painted themselves into a proverbial corner.

Since we knew he was their only tradable guy, why on Earth did they go and trade him for Quentin Richardson? Q has had exactly one good season in the league and he was the 4th or 5th option on that Phoenix team. I thought they signed Houston to hit shots for them. I thought they signed Jamal Crawford to hit shots for them when it became clear that Houston wasn't healthy. I thought Tim Thomas was supposed to be able to hit shots. I thought Maurice Taylor was a shooter. I thought Stephon Marbury could knock them down when necessary.

There were exactly two consistent scorers for the Knicks last season, Steph and Kurt Thomas. Kurt hits that baseline jumper with the consistency that Ewing used to. He spreads out the defense on the baseline and creates opportunities for his teammates and he's not afraid to crash the boards and guard any big man in the league.

Richardson would be a good pickup for a lot of teams, but the Knicks are so far beyond the point of adding a role player who can hit threes that this move is absolutely ludicrous.

Is Michael Sweetney really the best the Knicks have to offer in terms of an inside force? The Knicks have lacked size and the ability to play big teams for years now and they traded away their only two quasi-legitimate big men in Kurt Thomas and Nazr Mohammed, who was a key role player in the Spurs run to the championship this year, but the way.

This is getting to be absurd. The salary cap for last season was about $45 million and the Knicks payroll was $105 million. The best team they could put together with a team 250% over the salary cap was the last place finisher in the weakest division in the league.

At this point I can see no light at the end of the tunnel.

If I'm not at home and I think of something to blog about, I invariably forget it by the time I get home. It's happened to me 4 or 5 times in the last couple weeks. I haven't updated much recently not for lack of ideas, but simply because I can't remember them when I sit down to write.

That's lame. Can anyone think of the ideas I may have had to blog about? Anything interesting happen in the last couple weeks that's blogworthy? Leave a comment if you think of one.

Short review of the movie. I saw it about two weeks ago and I liked it. Here's my one criticism and it really applies to all of the prequels: They crammed all of the things that would have interested me as a Star Wars fan into the last ten minutes of Episode 3.

The first two movies were really superfluous and could have really been done away with. The story that's told in the first movie could have been 20 minutes of one of the movies. The story that's told in the second movie, minus the Anakin Padme love story, could have been another 20 minutes, and then the whole rest of the three movies really should have expanded on that last ten minutes. The whole series of films lead up to that point in an enormously roundabout way, and then they sewed up every single loose end in the epilogue more or less.

I would have liked to see a deeper probing of why all those guys went into exile and more on the destruction of the Jedi and more about Obi Wan being put in charge of basically watching Luke and things like that. All of that is dealt with in basically one line apiece in Episode 3. That was gonna be the really interesting stuff. Instead they created unnecessary plot contrivances that no one cared about.

I still say that Empire Strikes Back is the best of all 6 movies by a long shot.

On my digital cable box this was the description of the story they were broadcasting on Dateline about a week ago.



I tuned in eagerly, but apparently it was two different pieces they did. One on the terror, and one on Kelly Clarkson (who's High Pitch?).

An 11 year old kid crashed his mom's car after she let him drive to school. That's pretty stupid and goes along well with Daffy's post about bad parents.

I don't understand, though, why one of the kid's punishements was to be expelled from school. What did he do that endangered his academic career? Certainly his mother should be chastised and the kid should get a traffic ticket and such, possibly delay him legally getting his license, but why expel him from school? What good does that do? Why is that even related to the bad decision to drive a car?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Dude, Pedro Martinez is the heart and soul of this Mets club. They play inspired baseball every time he pitches and all of the success this team is having is coming from him either directly or indirectly.

All we heard were reports about how he was a bad teammate coming out of Boston, but the opposite is happening right now. Pedro is leading this team to respectability. The defense is tighter, the offense comes alive, and the team comes to play every time Pedro pitches, and I think he gives them confidence even when he's not on the field.

This is an interesting turn of events.

(I like that I started this post with "Dude..", like I was a stoner or something.)

A somewhat arbitrary thought.

I'm sitting right now next to an open window during rain storm. I think one of my favorite sounds in the world is the sound of the rain falling. Especially at night. Especially in the summer. Also the thunder going off during the rain storm every so often. I find it to be enormously relaxing, and a somewhat necessarily introspective moment.

If you add to that the wind coming through the window and the occasional droplet of water, then that is one of the more sublime moments in life. When I was growing up my bed was right up against the window and I would often leave my window open during the rain in the summer because I found the sound and the occasional raindrop on my face to be pleasurable. I think that's what I equate this similar experience to.

Another of my favorite sounds is a train approaching from a distance. That includes the rumble of the tracks and the whistle of the train from a distance. I also equate this with being in bed when I was young. I lived up the street from the train tracks, far enough so that the sound wasn't annoying, but close enough to hear it as it went by. The tracks near my house were for a freight train, so it went by at all hours of the night. The late night or early morning trains would relax me as they went by if I happened to be up.

More than anything, these are the two scenarios that probably relax me most and both of them I equate with being in bed as a child. I don't live near train tracks any more, so I don't really get that at all any more. The nighttime spring or summer rainfall makes me happy, though.

There was a girl who was in Aruba with 100 of her classmates and went missing. Just recently two guys were arrested in connection with the case. This is obviously terrible and everything and no one wants to see people go missing, but I'm more amazed at the situation that this girl and her classmates were in.

Who the fuck goes to Aruba for a senior trip? Aruba? Who paid for that? Who's idea was that? Who in the school district thought it was reasonable to send the senior class to Aruba?

My senior trip was to....wait, I didn't even have a senior trip. But if I did, we certainly wouldn't have gone to Aruba. If we were lucky, which we weren't, we would have gone to Great Adventure or something for a day.

I can't get over this. Well, obviously they're never going to Aruba again.

The 5 teams in the NL East are all within 1.5 games of each other. The Nationals are currently in first place with Atlanta in 2nd a half game behind. Both the Mets and Phillies are 1 game behind and the Marlins are 1.5 games out.

Going into the season this was the most hotly contested division on paper, and it seems to be working out as expected. It's great for all of these teams to be in contention, and I imagine that they will all remain in contention to win the division into September, but they're going to stay so close to each other that none of them will even contend for a wild card. It's all or nothing in the NL East this year.

Also despite the fact that everyone is evenly matched, we all know that the Braves will most likely win the division at the end of the day.

You probably know that I love the Dave Matthews Band. There are several people on Earth who recognize me solely by the fact that I love the band. That's moderately interesting in itself, but not extremely relevant. The DMB just released a new studio album last week called Stand Up, and it's not especially good. Their last album, Busted Stuff, was not especially good either. I'm wondering now if their first few albums were just produced really well, or if Dave is just out of ideas for writing good songs. My guess is the former, and I'll tell you why. Let's look album by album. If you're not interested in the whole analysis, then just skip to the end after the album descriptions.

Remember Two Things - This whole album was recorded from a club they played gigs in. It was mainly all of the first few songs Dave wrote and is pretty raw, but is very good. I don't know that it was really "produced" by anyone since it's mainly performances and not a traditional studio album. Anyway, there's sortof an exuberance about it that I really enjoy.

Under the Table and Dreaming - Their first big label album, produced by Steve Lillywhite. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard at the time and that's why I loved it. The violin and saxophone solos that went on forever were a novel idea for me and I loved Boyd on the violin especially. Also I got this album at the time in my life when I was most impressionable as a music fan. I think I was 16, possibly 17. All of the albums that I have a literal emotional reaction to I heard for the first time around this time in my life.

Crash - Also produced by Steve Lillywhite. I also got this album within that impressionable window. I was 17 when this album came out, my senior year in high school. This one is even more exploratory with featuring the violin and saxophone and flute and also has my favorite song on Earth, the aptly titled #41.

Before These Crowded Streets - The last one of their albums produced by Steve Lillywhite. A bit of a different direction, but still quality. The last 5 tracks are the tightest string of any album of theirs to date. Lots of violin and sax, again what I enjoy most about them.

After this album they went to make another one with Lillywhite and for whatever reason it just didn't work out. They scrapped the whole album and went out to LA and made an entirely new one.

Everyday - This one was produced by Glen Ballard who was he driving force behind the Alanis Morissette album, Jagged Little Pill. To say that the albums they made with Lillywhite were loosely produced sounds like a gross overstatement until you listen to this album. It is enormously tight, every song is under 5:00, and it is a huge departure for the DMB. Every song features electric guitar playing from Dave, rather than the acoustic he used on all the other albums with the exception of one or possibly two songs. When you would go to a concert and he would get the electric guitar before this album came out, you knew he was going to play "Crush". There are zero violin solos and zero saxophone or flute solos, and they really only come in during the choruses in the background. The hardcore fans, of which I was one at the time, did not like this album when it came out. This one has really grown on me, however. Every time I listen to this album I like it more, to the point that it's one of my favorites now. If this were an album by another band I would have loved it from the beginning, the fact that it was a departure from their sound was offputting at first.

Busted Stuff - This one was produced by some guy who's name I don't know. It is basically every song that was going to be on the album they scrapped with Steve Lillywhite. Actually, the album is kindof boring. The tempo of every song is pretty slow, and it never really gets going. A lot of the songs are great individually, Bartender, Grey Street, Grace is Gone, and Where Are You Going, for example, but the whole album is sortof a chore to listen to together.

Some Devil- The Dave Matthews solo album. Not sure why he made one without the band. It's OK, nothing spectacular. I really like So Damn Lucky, but I can't think of another song I really like off that one from the top of my head.

Stand Up- Again produced by some guy who's name I can't remember. This guy is known for producing hip hop albums, so I'm not sure how he got onto the DMB project. He's a co-writer on every song and he plays the keyboards on every track as well. There are again zero violin or saxophone solos and actually the piano sound is featured in a lot of the songs. The lyrics for this album are both corny and disjointed. You could argue (I wouldn't, but one might) that the lyrics are generally corny for all DMB music, but even by that standard these lyrics are bad, and at times are sortof dissonant. I haven't really gotten into this album yet because I start to listen and don't especially enjoy it so I put in a different DMB album since I'm pining at that point for something I'd enjoy. This one might end up growing on me as well, but so far I'd have to say it's pretty bad overall.

OK, I doubt you would have read this whole thing if you weren't at least a marginal DMB fan. My point is this, though, I think that the producers of their albums have a huge effect on the outcome. That's probably true of any band or artist, but I feel like their last three albums (Everyday, Busted Stuff, and Stand Up) have really inhibited what is great about the DMB. I love Everyday at this point, but it goes right in with the group in terms of limiting what they are capable of.

The Lillywhite albums have an exploratory feel about them and go out of their way to feature each member of the band. You could argue that this was at the expense of song quality, but I would wholly disagree with that because I love the sound of those albums. The more recent albums feature just the average guitar pop/rock sound that any band without a full time violinist and saxophonist/flautist could do.

To be honest, these more recent efforts have been marginal at best and they lack the energy that jumped from the earlier albums. None of them really explore the songs very much either. I got a feel from the Lillywhite albums that they used to search for things within each song and tried to suck every ounce of musicality from them, whereas the newer albums are formulaic and don't really explore much of anything. You can tell within the first 30 seconds if you like the song now because it doesn't do any changing. A lot of the songs are still good, but haven't reached their potential, in my opinion.

Who was the fucking genius who decided that people don't watch TV in the summer? Up until Beverly Hills 90210 scored a ratings coup in the early '90s by actually airing new episodes in the summer, there simply was no new programming in the summer. This sucked.

Now, however, there is a ton of new programming over the summer and it's great because a lot of it is sortof experimental type stuff that wouldn't ever get on in the "real" season. The combination of the summer season and the popularity of reality TV has made the past few summers a great time for TV programming. If you have a sitcom, then you have to give your actors the summers off so they can shoot movies or just sit around and do cocaine or something, so you can't really have new shows. Reality TV can be filmed at any time and aired in the summer and it works well.

Some great shows have debuted in the summer. Survivor was the show that really got the summer season going. Even though it wasn't the originator (see 90210, 1st paragraph) it was the show that made the summer season viable. Since then shows like The Amazing Race and Last Comic Standing have debuted in the summer to positive ratings. Also shows that aren't as good as those, but are guilty pleasures started their runs in the summer like Joe Millionaire or The Bachelor or the one I watched last night, Hit Me Baby One More Time, that brings back bands who had a hit or two years ago to perform again. Last night they had Loverboy, Flock of Seagulls, Arrested Development, Tiffany, and Cece Peniston sing their hits. Arrested Development was voted the winner by the audience.

Now TV stations don't have to run the "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you." type commercials for their corny sitcom reruns that I didn't even want to watch the first time. Usually in the summer there's a baseball game or two on that I'm interested in, and then I can switch to the fun reality show that's on that night also. Quality. Give it up for the summer season.