It’s like it’s 1990 and I’m collecting baseball cards again. Instead of Topps, Donruss, and Upper Deck, I’m on CBS Sportsline, ESPN, and Yahoo reading up on every player no matter if they are a starter or just a worthless common. I’m always scouting the next flyer I need to grab off the waiver wire. I hated football growing up as a kid (they called me a “skater fag”), but now I can tell you who every player is on every team. Living in New York, I’ve got the Super Bowl champion Giants and Brett Favre in my backyard now. I wish I had his rookie card!

This year, I got roped into being the commissioner of our fantasy football league and I took my duties very seriously. And now that the season is over, I am going the extra mile. I’ve once again enlisted the musical genius of Jon Solo (the Virtual Solos, in FF lingo) to lay down a hot beat so we could bust the ultimate fantasy football rap. Hut hut hike!

Download Fantasy Made a Fan of Me

Big shout out to all the dudes in the Bloody Sunday League!

Hollywood, CheesyPoofs, The Seachickens, J Mac Attack, Juicy Ju-Boys, U.S. Kids, Hong Kong Phoey, Zack Attack, Dyks on Byks, Colt 45’s!

Next year’s draft is right around the corner!

Commish and Virtual Solos over and out.

A Very Lucky Day

2008 Cherry Blossom Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.

Cranford Rose Garden Time-lapse at Brooklyn Botanic Garden from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.
 

I absolutely love it. I am pretty much a fanboy.

Confession: I have a macrumors.com account. I have posted there once.

Well, today is the 2008 Keynote so I want to bring some of the excitement of the fanboys to the masses (all 10 of you left reading this site). Here are my 2008 MacWorld Keynote Predictions:

iPod
Apple could go a couple of different ways with the next generation of iPods. (By the way, are iPods’ lives calculated in dog-years or something. How can one year go by and we call it a “generation” in reference to an iPod?) I’m really hoping they release a wireless iPod. No charging wire, no syncing wire, no headphone wires. The music just beams into my head when I want it to. All I do is look at my iPod and pull up my Mental Dashboard iTunes Widget and think-select a song. If I’m walking down the street and I see someone else with a wireless iPod, I can just ask them to let me think-type in my Apple iTunes ID into their list of acceptable iTunes AirWavers and I can hear what they are listening to as well! Or I can just cut off one of their ears. That works too because with the new iPod Air, you can only beam a song to your digitally-fingerprinted ear canals.

iLife
This will be the year that Apple realizes that most people don’t make movies, write songs, take pictures, or any of that crap that iLife software such as iMovie, Garage Band, and iPhoto let you do so easily. They will finally put out software for my boring iLife. iLoser lets you keep track of how fat and out of shape you are getting while always reminding you how pathetic you are (using the patented one-click iLackSelfConfidence voice abuser system). And bundled with iLoser? A mac version of Minesweeper!

Laptops
These will become obsolete with the next version of the iPhone. Apple is offering a $10 credit when you return a laptop and buy a new iPhone.

iPhone
As always, Steve Jobs will save the best for last and announce the latest updates to the iPhone at the end. I’m guessing the new iPhone comes in 5 different colors! And you can jog with it now! It will be the first jogging phone! You set up your route with Google Maps, create a playlist, and boom, the two of you are out jogging together! You can set it to Rocky mode and have it run a few steps ahead of you, always pushing you to keep pace, or you can tell it you are in a lazy mood and want to chill. Either way is cool with your iPhone. It only jogs when you tell it to jog. You can also set it to block incoming calls during your jog or go instantly to speakerphone, if you want to be one of those jackasses that jogs and talks on your jogging-in-front-of-you iPhone.

No matter what happens at this year’s MacWorld, I know one thing is for sure. Me and bunch of other fanboys won’t be quite so lonely and unhappy tonight because we’ll have some expensive shiny new trinkets to distract us! Hooray! Now I’m off to macrumors.com to follow the Keynote speech live via text updates from inside the convention!

The Ellensburg Song (Rod Gooseman Remix)

Download mp3

I just have to personally say Solo kills this track. The beat is infectious. The production is on-point. It’s amazing to me how easy this all is with his talent and expertise. And thanks to him I realized I could never go on tour.

And when the new Johnny Paparazzi was out on a date and had to take the bull by the horns to make sure he and his date got to their seats at the theater before the show started and the crowd of fur-wearing painted blue hairs and puttering old tuxedos were shuffling in place like clueless zombies in the lobby, he reached back and grabbed her hand and just did it. Was it coincidence, then, when he approached this short, batty-looking, dyed-hair man moving at less than glacial speed and said “Excuse me, sir” as he bumped him and rushed past and the old man responded with such humility, honesty and kindness (“Why, of course, let me get out of the way.”) that he had to turn and look back? The old Johnny Paparazzi would have stopped to take a photo when it turned out he had just bowled over the Jerry Stiller of Seinfeld fame! The new one had to suck it up real quick and quash his excitement and keep moving, only to turn back to his date and say, “Did you see who that was? Jerry Stiller.” And he never brought it up again. (OK, that is a lie, but this was Jerry Stiller and he ended up sitting near us too. You still get the point.)

But the new Johnny Paparazzi wasn’t born overnight. He was born of indifference, really. He evolved through a disconcerting string of non-cool, b-list celebrity sightings.

The old Johnny Paparazzi tried to get jacked up when he stumbled upon an intimate outdoor performance by Josh Groban, but he couldn’t even muster up a cell-phone pic worth saving. (It meant deleting a pinball high score picture.) Lesson learned: When you are surrounded by a swarm of swooning, suburban soccer moms, celebrity, in and of itself, is not that cool.

Same goes for when Julia Stiles was walking down the opposite side of the street from him. As much as JP loves Miss Stiles, she looked absolutely like hundreds of the beautiful women he sees every day, so why get worked up, he thought. She just happens to have a job that puts her face in front of millions. It’s not as far-fetched as it once seemed. Lesson learned: If I ever run into Hilary Swank at a bar, the new Johnny Paparazzi will pull out all the stops. She is just a woman. And I am a man.

Jerome Bettis. Jerry Lee Lewis. Ana Gasteyer. Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. You get the picture.

The line of celebrity is getting thinner and thinner. With reality TV and the internet creating a whole new string of amateur celebrities as well, Johnny Paparazzi is evolving and operating under a new philosophy. Or an old philosophy if you are familiar with the movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

Be excellent to each other.

Or at least don’t be a jerk and get in someone’s face to take a photo.

Pour me a glass of gin
I’m already two whiskeys in
When the lights go dim
I’ll tell you the secret
I’ve kept since I was ten

I have a perpetual cough
That means a cough that just won’t stop
No cure at the shop
And to top it all off
I guarantee I won’t call the doc

As curable as this may seem
The last thing on my mind is me
But here is the twist
That you shouldn’t dismiss
None of this means a damn thing

For you, I’ll bring to the table
The absolute best health care available
And insist on its use
No matter the excuse
Even when the symptoms are questionable

And I’ll stay up with you all night
If you begin to cry from the fright
That out of sight
An invisible brain tumor
Is growing left and right

I’ll remind you to get that “thing” looked at
And follow up when you get back
So let’s make a pact
I’ll be yours
If you’ll be my emergency contact

One of the best parts about being a Netflix member is how fast the service is evolving. I feel like I am a part of movie distribution history. I’m no Rosa Parks but by adding my voice to the chorus of other Netflix members’ voices, I feel like movies will continue to arrive to me in unique and varying ways. This is empowering. It might just be the biggest social movement I’m ever apart of. Today it is through the mail, tomorrow it will be downloaded. In five years, I’m pretty sure I will be Netflixing Woody Allen’s DNA and just creating the movies for myself in my centrifuge.

But the absolute best part of being a Netflix member is the goal we all share, the one thing that brings all of us members together; our insufferable desire to scam, scrimp, rob, cheat, copy, burn, and screw over Netflix. By god, we really make them earn that $20 a month, don’t we! I’ll be damned if I ever have to put a movie on my queue twice. No, I would rather buy a hundred hard-drives, a thousand blank dvds, and laboriously spend hours following the hacking career of Jon Lech Johansen than reorder my fucking queue! All to squeeze every last movie I can out of the service!

OK, I am not joking anymore. I will tell you some of the things I have done in the past to prove my point.

1. Bought a DVD burner, blank DVD discs, and got the software for my mac from an illegal file-sharing network in order to burn a copy of every Netflix that arrived. Total cost: $150 and possibly my freedom. I was going to build a personal library that would rival Netflix’s own collection. This lasted about 2 months. None of the burned DVDs play now. Apparently, human breath scratches a blank DVD. Eventually, I realized Netflix is the library. I am just paying for my library card. And with all the new movies that they offer, I rarely want to rewatch a movie I’ve already Netflix’d.

2. Entered into a movie sharing pact with two friends who were also Netflix members to “pool our queues” if you will. That way, we wouldn’t have to all get the big blockbusters that we all wanted to see, just one of us would get it and then share it around. Total cost: $0. Total number of days this lasted: 3. My friend sat on the movie I gave her and didn’t watch it or return it, therefore effectively logjamming my precious queue for almost a week in Netflix time*. (*Netflix time is defined as regular time + the amount of time it takes to receive the next movie in your queue after you put the old movie in the mailbox.)

3. I’ve tried it all concerning the Netflix envelope. I’ve shoved three movies in one, one movie in three, and everything in between. I drop them in boxes all over Brooklyn, fold them, tear them, and write on them. I’ve soaked them in water, burnt off their edges, and every once in awhile I even find one that is two years old and I’ll stuff a disc in there and send it back. At this point, I am just fucking with the people at Netflix. I want to get in their heads. I am not a number baby!

Yet time after time, my new DVD arrives in the mail just the same. I’m convinced that without junk mail and Netflix, the postal service would have been abolished just minutes after email was invented. Before Netflix, I would only get one piece of mail a year and that is the birthday check from Grandma (that $25 is always appreciated, Gigi!) so I probably wouldn’t even have been the wiser had it been shuttered. But now I sit and wait for the mailman like he is delivering my college admissions acceptance letter, all in the name of quick turnaround.

Despite all this praise, I have found one person who can’t join the Netflix revolution. I bring it up now because, invariably, I know Netflix is listening and is poised to solve my friend’s dilemma. You see, he is a touring musician without a stable address. He can’t reliably have movies mailed to him. But I think I have come up with a solution. Think of an airplane flying a time sensitive mission over a very long distance. Classic scenario for a little aerial refueling also called air-to-air refueling. In the same spirit, I want to see a fleet of Netflix vehicles that roam the highways and byways performing vehicle-to-vehicle Netflix transfers.

“Sir, I see on your myspace page that you’ll be playing in Vermont tonight. I’ll be pulling up along side you shortly as you make your way to the venue and I was wondering if you had any last minute changes to your top three choices on your rental queue this evening?”

Knowing Netflix, the fleet is already being gassed up as I type this. We are making movie distribution history after all.