2. Not watching the episode.

So who are episode recaps for? Either people who’ve seen the episode, and therefore already know what happens; or people who don’t watch the episode, and therefore don’t care. So please, stop. I’m going to watch Mad Men in probably like five years from now. But I don’t need to read it now.

Photo via Flickr's Chloe Lee. Click through for more!

On Friday, the creators and entire principal cast of The Adventures of Pete and Pete reunited for one of the first times since the show ended in 1996 which, in case you forgot how old we are, was nearly 20 years ago. The show featured the first-ever live performance of The Blowholes, the fictional supergroup created for the episode about little Pete’s favorite song, featuring Marshall Crenshaw (aka the meter reader), Syd Straw (Ms. Fingerwood!) and little Pete. And it was Kreb-tastic! Here’s them covering the show’s theme, “Hey Sandy” (for which Straw is reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper):

Among the revelations at the reunion:

-Toby Huss (Artie) was the guy in the Mr. Softee suit.

-At one point, Iggy Pop went up to Hardy Rawls (Dad Wrigley) and said “That guy who plays Artie, he’s kind of a weirdo, huh?”

-Alison Fanelli was the only non-blonde, non-monotone actress to read for the part of Ellen. She handed in a resume on a piece of notebook paper with a picture attached. They hired her because of her cute unprofessionalism.

-While filming one day, the crew couldn’t find little Pete on set. Turns out he was in Iggy Pop’s trailer learning to play bass. He was about 12.

-Ms. Fingerwood was originally named something else (which I can’t remember, sorry!), but Nickelodeon deemed it too dirty. So they went with Fingerwood, which was less dirty somehow?

-All the cast and crew commented on how funny it was to see the gang all growns up: “It’s weird to see the Petes drunk on beer,” Straw told the crowd.

-The creators, buoyed by the burgeoning indie rock credentials of the show wanted to use a Pixies song (probably Wave of Mutilation, they said) in one episode. But they didn’t get to use it because it was too damn expensive.

-All the guest stars came through connections the show’s crew had to the downtown manhattan art scene in the 90s.

-Ellen is still totally crushable.

-Nick opposed the use of “blowhole” as one of the show’s standard insults. But as it was just officially defined as a fleshy hole for breathing, they had no grounds to stand on.

-Toby Huss IS a crazy bastard. And it’s great.

And now, let’s reflect why this was such a BFD:

I’ve revisited Pete & Pete a few times over the years, especially as the DVDs were released a few years ago, but it probably never really hit me until last week just how much of an influence it had on own strange maturation. I had grown up watching Nickelodeon, and Pete & Pete landed in that pocket of television where Nick was experimenting with the idea that it was OK to be weird, that it was perfectly acceptable to not want to be a grownup, to live in that world where the gross aesthetics of Ren and Stimpy and the slimy sounding names (like Slurm and Fingerwood) were perfect projections of the kid imagination, before it had been corrupted with pop culture and over-education. 

The show was smart and sharp, creative in a way we couldn’t understand as pre-teens but would later realize was various forms of performance art (watch the scene of Petes’ dad climbing on top of the station wagon to build a luggage rack while cursing at 60 miles an hour down the highway for an example), treating us to so many references we wouldn’t get until years later. Suffice it to say it was breeding a generation of people who would later be called hipsters, those of us who were treated to images of Iggy Pop, Steve Buscemi, Michael Stipe, LL Cool J, Juliana Hatfield and more, long before we knew who most of them were, or realized how odd it was that they should be appearing in a strange kids show.

Pete and Pete tapped into something deep inside that was hard to express in the cookie-cutter New Jersey suburbs in the 90s: the feeling that there was just something wrong with the way the adults of the world were doing things, and that the traditional straight-line path to adulthood and homeownership was on a collision course set for horrible, soul-sucking boredom. This is the theme that runs through the whole show: the constant references to the International Adult Conspiracy and things like little Pete asking Dad, “So you don’t like the taste of coffee, but you drink it anyway?” which is barely a throw-away line amid a bigger plot arc. It’s no coincidence that around this time I realized three things about myself: 1) I needed to get out of New Jersey before I got sucked into the bland, black hole of awful rote law-mowing lifestyle and 2) I would never, ever get stuck in a job that had a cubicle or was not significantly awesome and 3) I probably would never have kids, out of the fear of turning into one of Them [2012 Tim should note that he has since run into some parents who do this whole raising cool kids thing right, especially around BK].

Ellen, you could lead my algebra insurrection any day.

The show captures that particular frustration you get as a kid thinking about all the wonderful, bizarre things you can do in the world and knowing that there’s a button-down line of adults who want to stand in your way. Nowhere is this more apparent then in what is probably my favorite episode, “X=Why?” in which Ellen leads in insurrection in algebra class when she demands to know the answer to a simple question, “Why are we learning this?” And there I was, sitting in 7th grade, scratching away at matrices and algorithms in a drab industrial brick middle school building on the side of a highway, wondering just what the hell any of this had to do with anything. And like Ellen, we never got good responses from teachers who never really thought about it themselves, and we were left to passively absorb information until the next soul-sucking class began.

The problem with that, as I came to understand it, isn’t school itself, or algebra, or the need for mandatory education in this country: it’s the lack of connection and respect there was coming from the adult generation toward the eager but stunted young people. Simply, there was a lack of logical connection between what you were supposed to be learning and its implications in the real world. It’s not that algebra has real-world applications (as it is so often wrongly defended by Ms. Fingerwood and hundreds of teachers worldwide), but that algebra and the like are supposed to be intense yoga for your brain, exercises that make you smarter to deal with solving other problems in the world that actually do matter, so that you might be fit to mentally sprint across the world and make it better for yourself and all of us. After all (as I would have said if I were ever a teacher), baseball players just swing bats, but they spend a lot of time in the gym lifting weights before that. No, instead we got the “do it because you’re told to mentality,” either because the adults were too uncurious to ask more or just too lazy to defend themselves. Even in the resolution of this episode, which in typical TV fashion has Ellen calling off the revolution and admitting that math may have some uses, it isn’t a complete victory for the adults: Fingerwood changes her lessons to make the word problems seem relevant to the real world, and we break through (via a scene of an outdoor class) this idea that all education is a stuffy snore fest.

Pete and Pete created an alternate reality as seen from the eyes of kids who can’t grow up, a world that’s beautiful and strange and a little scary, where we can have our own personal super heroes, where the parents are often powerless and petty and the day can be saved by a visit from the ice cream truck. The whole show felt like a wander through a long summer vacation, the way you can freewheel through the suburbs on your bike and find that secret trove of friends to conspire with. This idea was bolstered even more at the reunion show when the creators said they shot on a summer filming schedule, with the final episode of the series, appropriately, communing in early winter, the visible breath coming from the cast as a fitting send-off.

On top of all that youthful sense of insurrection, I realized the show gave us something else, through its sly use of guest stars: it showed this idea that there were a group of adults out there who could pass the test of time without completely folding up all that youthful imagination, those cool Syd Straws and Arties of the world who got a kick out of hanging out with a bunch of kids all day, doing wonderful and odd things that neither of their parents would probably approve of. “Are you still in school?” Straw asked the crowd, cheekily. You could tell the older cast and crew treated the kids like co-conspirators, not commodities.

So I looked around the Bowery Ballroom on Friday night and saw probably 100 other guys and girls who looked like me, and probably grew up with the same sort of nudge in the odd and curious direction because of the show (and yes, there were plenty of flannels). But then we were all was smiling and awe-struck watching everyone come out on stage, and it felt like a reunion from a lost summer camp, only to find out that not one of your camp buddies reneged on their pledge to never become an adult.

Thanks, Petes.

Ted also had this — is it a dig? A snark? I’m not sure what to call it, except maybe accurate — jem: when introducing comedian Jamie Lee, he said, “She was a finalist on Last Comic Standing … which you don’t know about, because you’re hipster trash like me and you don’t own a TV.” And it’s true.

So please enjoy a portion of his cover of the Brenton Wood Song “Gimme Little Sign” from Hot Tub.

And please enjoy this gratuitous picture of Ted with a Brokelyn shirt, which he said he was wearing all day but had to take it off before the show so he could “shower” or whatever. At which point we ripped the shirt away from him and told him never to besmirch our brand with “cleanliness” again. Kidding!

You would get a free shirt too if you wrote "Timorous Me."

With comedian Dave Hill on the left and host Jody Avirgan of WNYC (off screen), answering a question from Hill, “What is your least favorite time of week?”

Answering a question about whether he’s afraid of turbulence on a flight, and talking a little about his upcoming trip to Russia to promote Page One.

On why Twitter can drive him crazy, why anti-sports elitism is bullshit and making a prediction for the Super Bowl.

“It’s fucking Giants, all the way!”

Also, I talked to Carr afterward and we were interviewed by a strange man with a squirrel puppet and a video camera. As such:

After that, we were talking shop for a minute, when Carr grabbed my arm, twisted it toward his wife and said “Yeah, but this guy’s hardcore. Look at his tattoo.”

He said they use a different text to indicate the end of a story at the Times now, but “I like that one better.”

I’ve had worse evenings.

McCain realizes campaigning can sometimes be a real b word.

(Island Packet, Nov. 16, 2007) The question had a cadence and a sharp alliteration that sliced through the yadda-yadda-yadda about Social Security and health care that dominated Sen. John McCain’s campaign stop on Hilton Head Island on Monday.

With news cameras rolling, Wexford resident Linda Burke, prim in a neck scarf and pulled-back hair, leaned forward out of the crowd and asked plainly and emphatically: “How do we beat the bitch?”

That word, henceforth called the “B-Bomb,” referred to Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner who stirs up vituperative feelings deep in the gut of many Republicans.

It turned into the B-Bomb heard ’round the world.

Burke’s question — and McCain’s reaction — has caught fire with political wonks across the nation, appearing on cable news and turning into the issue du jour for liberal commentators. The blogosphere, that shadowy zone where even the most minuscule thing a candidate says is recorded, dissected, criticized and resent into the digital ether, is having a field day with it.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez, unleashing his inner feminist, did an entire segment on it, asking if the incident would finish McCain’s presidential hopes. For whatever reason, he sought Whoopi Goldberg’s opinion on it, too.

On Thursday, Inside Edition called The Island Packet asking for a photograph of Burke. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed more than 900,000 times.

In short, the McCain campaign is getting B-slapped by the Hilton Head incident.

Here’s what happened: After Burke’s question at Trinity Restaurant and Bar, the room full of supporters erupted in hearty laughter and McCain squirmed, blinked and asked, “Can I get the translation?” before letting a small smile slip out.

Here’s the part causing all the ruckus: McCain, wiping sweat from his brow and trying to bring the crowd back around, said, “But that’s an excellent question,” before launching into a comment about a recent poll showing he’s the only Republican who can beat Clinton in the general election.

For liberal bloggers and commentators, not chastising the use of the B-Bomb and calling it an “excellent question” was a classless move. And in front of McCain’s 95-year old mother, even!

“It hit YouTube and really it caught fire on the Internet as an example of John McCain’s style, and unfortunately his lack of tact in this case,” said Steve Benen, editor of the popular liberal blog The Carpetbagger Report (www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com), which posted a video of the incident Tuesday. “I think it really reflects poorly on Senator McCain.”

Benen and other bloggers point to an incident a few days ago when McCain rebuffed his own mother’s comments about Mormonism on national television, but let the B-Bomb fall untouched.

For Burke, however, national exposure isn’t her only experience amplifying her feelings about the former first lady.

When Clinton moved to New York and ran for Senate, appearing in a parade outside Burke’s former home on 68th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City, she stuck a megaphone out her window and yelled “GO HOME!.”

“I’m terrified of her,” Burke said in an interview after Monday’s event. For the record, she’s still undecided, but leaning toward Rudy Giuliani.

Clinton’s campaign declined comment for this story, but Republicans say the incident is getting distorted. McCain said at the event: “I respect Sen. Clinton, I respect anyone who gets the nomination of the Democrat Party.”

McCain’s South Carolina campaign spokesman B.J. Boling said CNN’s Sanchez in particular was trafficking in “hyper-sensationalism.”

“His dramatics on what happened on Hilton Head not only reflect poorly on him but on CNN as a whole,” Boling said. “And if Mr. Sanchez had done the responsible thing as a journalist and actually paid attention to this race he would know that Sen. McCain has the utmost respect for Sen. Clinton and Mr. McCain has mentioned that respect time and time again on the campaign trail.”

Indeed, the two are often seen as congenial Senate cohorts, working together on issues such as climate change and Iraq. In a trip through Estonia in 2004, Clinton reportedly challenged McCain to a vodka-drinking contest.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint criticized the use of the B-Bomb, but had no comment on McCain’s handling of it, spokesman Wesley Denton said.

“He just thought that there’s no need to get personal and show that kind of disrespect,” Denton said.

Watching an event on YouTube is different from being there, of course. The mood at Trinity restaurant was mostly upbeat and jocular. McCain opened with a joke that compared lawyers to “scum-sucking bottom feeders,” then told another about drunk Irishmen.

“He answered it pretty well and he laughed a little bit himself,” said James Walsh, the co-owner of Trinity. “It just kind of caught everyone off guard.”

Staff writer Michael Welles Shapiro contributed to this report.

Cartoon by Drew Sheneman/The Star Ledger

The early primary season is based on one uniting theory: the candidate who is going to win is the one that has the most momentum, and the candidate with the most momentum is the one that won the previous primary, which was wan by the candidate with the most momentum, etc etc, reductio absurdum.

It’s posited to us that the Iowa caucuses set the tone for the entire year, that they are the pre-pre games that determine which teams wind up in the Super Bowl. This is the problem of our media, in that we’re only able to cover the presidential contest as a horse race, more focused on measuring the inches between candidates rather than the issues that separate them. From above, you’d think they’re covering a particularly abortion-obsessed game of Plants vs. Zombies. Covering electoral politics like the NFL is what keeps CNN and Fox News burning on TVs all year long.

But did you know that only two candidates — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — who won the caucuses went on to win the presidency? And the rest of the stats are even less impressive: The caucuses have only picked the eventual nominee for either party 63 percent of the time since they first rose to prominence in 1972. That’s an awesome D minus average for predictability, yet we’ve been getting wall-to-wall coverage of it for months now, with the cable news stations treating it like every one of Iowa’s 3 million residents is some sort of soothsaying wizard consulting mystical corn husks until they finally share their wisdom with the rest of the world this week.

So the primary cycle looks like this, and all it takes is one catalyst win for pundits and lots of other people sitting behind tables on TV to spark the cycle into motion even when, it turns out, there are actually 49 other states in the nation that might have opinions of their own that are vastly different from Iowans:

And by the time the primaries have gotten around to parts of the country more varied in population than Iowa and New Hampshire, the unstoppable presidential campaign megalodon has declared the “feeling of inevitability” so why bother campaigning anywhere else in the country? Huh, Rudy Giuliani? Why were you so silly to think you can avoid places that set the tone for this whole circus and just do the logical thing and focus on Florida, where your base of support was? It’s like the Grammys: everyone in the industry knows it’s a ridiculous ceremony not representative of the actual state of taste for the year, yet everyone puts on their tux and dress and does a little bow in front of the old white guys who act like they arbiter national taste. Because that’s the way we do it, and it’s important if we say it’s important.

Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times last week that we should “feel free to ignore Iowa” because of not only its demographic misrepresentation of the rest of the country but also, notably, some of the major Republican candidates haven’t even spent much time there this year, when the whole point of the damn caucus in the first place is supposed to be that the informed Iowans got a chance to personally meet and talk with the candidates (again, that elevated class of wizened uber-voters supposed to represent the high-mindedness the rest of us don’t have  time to worry about — we’re very busy here on the coasts producing Culture, you know!). Collins summarizes: “On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican. The whole world will be watching.”

Collins’ call to ignore these “ridiculous” Iowa system not withstanding, who are the people actually making these decisions that set that whole flow chart in motion? It’s the 1 percent! No, not the bête noire 1 percent of Occupy Wall Street, but the statistical 1 percent of people Who Have Time to Caucus and Care to Do It.

We’re talking about 1 percent of the population of Iowa, 1 percent that actually weigh in on these things that thenceforth become a barometer for the whole election year to come. Collins notes the Republicans were hoping for a turnout of 100,000 this week — an amount that is just 3 percent of the whole population of the state, slightly less than the amount needed to fill the Michigan Wolverine’s football stadium. In 2008, CNN touted both sides for having “record turnout:” 120,000 for the elephants and 227,000 for donkey town.

In 2000, George W. Bush won the caucus with about 36 percent of the vote— 1.2 percent of the population. Last time around in 2008, Mike Huckabee came out the winner, getting support from the practically brag-worthy 1.3 percent of Iowans. Even farther back, George Bush the First won about 1.3 percent in the 1980 caucus, and somehow that massive groundswell of support still wasn’t enough to beat Reagan for the nomination that year.  That 1 percent of Iowa population is barely .01 percent of the total US population, FYI.

Of course, this is the open secret among the media who know damn well that Iowa is just Iowa and that it’s not America, but they still stick to this now decades-old trope about the soothsaying of the caucuses because, well, what the hell else are they supposed to do to fill the time before the election run up materialized to a point where we could have some informed commentary on it. Go out and do ACTUAL REPORTING? But Begala! He doesn’t like the outdoors! If that happened, our nation’s television graphics and touch-screen display device economies would plummet dramatically.

Tuesday morning on WNYC, Brian Lehrer posited the idea that maybe we should rotate the dates of the early caucuses and primaries to give other states a shot at being noticed once in awhile during an election year. Would that ever work? It seems to me it would be a more representative way to make our nation feel like every part of it was involved in the electoral process (also, could we just do them all on one day? You guys could stop fighting over “firsts” like childish blog commenters then).

But the political machines, media and parties would never go for it, because they have their narrative and they’re loathe to diverge from it, because American democracy is best when reduced to a game of surges and polls, debates and gaffs, plants and zombies. And the rest of us are left tuning in to the dalliances of 1 percent of Iowans, wondering if maybe they would let the rest of us have a turn once in awhile.

Election data via: http://uselectionatlas.org/

2. My Pretty Pony, from season 3 of Veronica Mars*, featuring Paul Rudd in a  great cameo playing in a clearly grunge-era band attempting to do a resurgence for the millennial generation after a fall-from-grace psychological breakdown.

3. The fictional band in my head (called something like Horse Radish [rad-ish in the tubular sense, that is]) in which we wrote and recorded “Someday I Will Treat You Good” five years before Sparklehorse did.

(*have you not watched Veronica Mars? If you like Party Down, you should watch Veronica Mars. If you don’t like Party Down, get the hell off my wordpress this instant.)

Hitchens rides a bike. Via Vanity Fair

On Dec. 12, I participated in my third PUNDERDOME 3000 in Park Slope, an event that is exactly what it sounds like (if you’re saying “I mustache you a question” about this, I humbly request you shave it for later).

One of the semi final categories was WILL SMITH; On my turn, I opened with, “I heard that Will Smith’s favorite Atlantic writer was Christopher HITCHens.”

And then, three days later, Christopher Hitchens died  (incidentally giving us the only repeated use of the term “polemicist” in modern obituary history).

If this trend continues, things that also should be on the lookout: Big Willie Smiles, Fresh Prints, Giant Goddamn Steampunk Spider.

RIP Hitch. You were an asshole sometimes, but you were damn good at it, and sometimes I’ll take an asshole who can make words sing over a caring person who doesn’t know the difference between polemics and Pilates.

(OK, final side note: when you google image search “polemics Pilates,” the first result is Maureen Dowd reading Maxim. What does this mean???)

Emma Strauberry

Jen Carlsjrson

Puree Shafrir

Anil Mrs. Dash

Nate Freerangechicken

Brian Rieses Pieces

Rosie Gravy

Carl Ron Swanson’s Breakfast

Choire Sriracha

Alex Balkan Tulumbe 

Jim Brûlée

Emily Gulden’s

Kat Stouffers

Jen Dahl

Dill Keller

Sachertorte Frere-Jones

Joe Cous-couscarelli

Hugo Limburger

Ryan O’krannel

Edith Zeppoleman 

Lawrence Ryeght

Jennifer Veganburger 

Molson Whitehead

Jonathan Franzia

Brian Speltler 

David Carrbonara

Td

[STUPID PIECE WENT HERE AND HERE AND HERE]

Dec 23, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Choire Sicha wrote:
>TIM.

You are so wrong in the head!

Dec 23, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Tim Donnelly wrote:
> sometimes I just have to amuse myself.

Dec 23, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Choire Sicha wrote:
>SICK MONSTER!!!