The Anderson Column

Tomorrow Mrs Anderson is heading out for a work-day interview at 6:45am. That means that until noon daddy has one of his first days in charge of four months old August. I’m crossing my fingers for lots of fun, lots of laughter and lots of sleep.
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading to our boy and making silly faces and tickling him, but nothing gets grumpier than our child when he’s too tired. It is NUTS!

Since I’ll be working from home (doing god knows what) and the Mrs will be out working in an office, this will be the first of many days when I’ll have to be a good father who takes good care of his son.
I just wish he was old enough that we could go out and throw a football around and immediately collapse for a nap afterwards.
Until that age, wish me luck!

My team clearly didn’t make it very far in these play offs. It doesn’t particularly bother me this year, but one thing that does is the fact that I’m torn between watching football, just because it’s the playoffs, and hating all the games played because my team is not in it.
So far, I’ve not watched much and I don’t plan on watching the games anytime soon. When I’m jonesing this bad already, it’ll be a long eight months until things start up again. Hopefully the draft can provide some relief and we might head up to Boston to check out the summer camp – get a little break out of it.

Anyway, since we’re not watching football, Mrs Anderson discovered The Tudors on Showtime. So far we’ve managed to watch some six episodes in three days and I have to admit that it’s not a bad show, despite historical inaccuracies. TV shows are such fantastic time wasters, it reminds me of the time when I first discovered The Wire and Battlestar Galactica. So much time spent watching these shows, I’m sure it won’t be long until we have people going into treatment from “tv show addiction”. Maybe someone already has?

It took me almost 10 minutes to delete all the viagra spam comments that had been left in my absense, but at least it made me feel like my blog had gotten some attention even when I was gone.

Everyone in the house is sick. Not terminally ill or anything grave, but just enough colds to keep Tylenol in business for another season or two. I know I’ll get over mine pretty quickly (even if it’s been a week or so now), but it breaks my heart to see the little guy with a boogery nose and crying because he has trouble breathing when he has his binky. So please make that stop!

Other than that it’s been pretty hectic and busy around here, but should be slowing down a lot in the time to come. Mrs Anderson should hopefully be starting work again soon and that leaves me alone to brainwash, I mean raise, our son in the day time. Hopefully he won’t be too emotionally scarred by that ordeal.

Anyway, about to head out to put New England Patriots auto stickers on the cars. Important tasks for important people, right?

Anyone who isn’t a Patriots (or at least football) fan, probably doesn’t care about Adalius Thomas doing everything he can to prove that he doesn’t belong in the New England Patriots locker room.

So let me give you a little back story to make this relevant to you. Adalius Thomas was a pro bowl defensive end/outside linebacker with the Baltimore Ravens for a number of years. He was pretty beastly on defense, turned the ball over and tackled a bunch. Sounds like a great player to have on your team, right?

So thought Bill Belichick who signed Thomas as a free agent in 2006 with a contract making him one of the highest paid players in New England where he gradually turned out to be all chowder, no clam. Or maybe he turned out to be all clam, no chowder, I don’t know. You pick.

Fast forward to 2009 where Thomas is now a dissident member of the New England team who doesn’t produce much when he’s on field and talks trash about the coaches and organization when he’s off the field. He’s benched while healthy against the Titans and again against Carolina this week, following the “Lategate” and does his best to trash talk his way out of the team. Obviously this sort of behavior coming from a veteran player, who is supposed to be a team leader and is also very handsomely paid, is going to spark some responses amongst fans. And so Michigan Dave of Patriots Planet and Michigan fame started the trend of posting straight hatorade in the form of Haiku. I joined in and the Hateku got flowing.

Here’s some of the best modern day NFL haiku the world has to offer. I encourage you to leave comments with your own examples of Hateku!

Michigan Dave:
Adalius Thomas (edit: failku)
You fat, lazy piece of shit
Eat a bag of dicks

Anderson:
So here is my stab
At hateku, the new haiku
AdT, go die

Michigan Dave, response to Anderson:
Tremendous effort
For that, you will be given
A three haiku post

Your av made me think
How sweet if Thomas were shot
Alas, a problem:

When he sees the gun
AD would think it’s a dick
And try to eat it

Anderson, response to MD:
In kinder response
Here is another hateku
That Thomas may die

Not literally
But please make your way, to
Raiders or the Browns

We beg you, Thomas
No more white, blue and red, since
Your play is, like, dead

MD:
Less worthy of air
Would it be Adalius or
Joey Galloway?

Anderson:
One is so putrid,
We might never see the like,
The other is bile

MD:
Runny, messy poo
After eating chili dogs
Better than AD

Hawg73:
AD’s lips move but
Much like his defensive stats
zeros fill the air

MD, response to Hawg73:
When AD’s lips move
Another thing hits zero:
Dicks left in the bag

Anderson:
Snow and ice on road
Is definitely not the
Cause of his slowness

bmooney54:
Adalius sucks!
Not just on the football field,
his attitude, too.

MD, response to bmooney:
Truth. But you forgot
The sucking also includes
That big bag of dicks

And to finish it off, even a new member of the site, benhamean, came up strong with:

Bet you were not late
To the bank to cash your check
How does Bill’s ass taste?

In short, I think it’s pretty obvious where we fans stand on the matter. Although non of us (to my knowledge) are using macbooks, we took the time to write plenty of Hateku. So AdT, Eff Off.

This player no longer a New England Patriots

I belong to that group of people who used to dream about having super powers. Actually, wrong tense. I belong to that group of people who dream of having super powers. I’ll admit that it’s less frequent these days, but I suppose with age you become slightly more pessimistic about the chances of being exposed to gamma rays or having a hidden gene that’ll turn you into a telekinetic.

Still there are times when you space out a little, maybe on the sofa, and those thoughts come back. What if..

I realize that for any adult, or at least any person of adult age, to admit that he dreams of having super human powers might seem a little odd. But I admire comics and I’ll happily admit that part of the allure is a healthy dose of escapism. When escapism and reality clashes, though, something is bound to happen. In my case, as I said above, I’ve reached that certain age when the likelihood of actually becoming a super hero (or villain, depending on mood) are, well, slim to none. Knowing that, but maintaining the dream, turned me onto the idea of creating a super hero. Creating a super villain. Creating a comic book of my own.

I’m not going to post pages and pages of my notes on here, because there is another place for that, but I thought it would be interesting to share my motivation for wanting to write a comic book. For the first project, which I’m doing with Tue over at Shine So Fine, we’ve decided to work with a modernization of Greek hero tales; although it’s a rework more than a modern interpretation.

Right now there couldn’t be better timing for a cup of hot chocolate, some Miles Davis (not trying to sound pretentious, I just really like Kind of Blue) and a revisiting of some classics.

Does anyone not want to do this?

Tonight at the gym (should be going more often, but promise not to make it a new year’s resolution), I’m doing some mindless running on a treadmill. Luckily I brought music to deafen out entertainment tonight and more stories about Tiger Woods. I might add here that, however small my involvement was, I feel bad about adding to that whole mess, but I’m straying from my point.

My portable music device carries a lot of music and one of the albums on there is 3 feet high and rising by De La Soul, in my opinion one of the best albums ever made (not just rap/hip hop) and I was excited to suddenly revisit old classics from this album, courtesy of the shuffle function.That got me to reminiscing about growing up, listening to Native Tongue albums and rap music in general. Nothing like a bit of sweat mixed with nostalgia, huh?

Rap was not all that popular when I was growing up and it was definitely not “SUV-driving college-girl rapping along to Gucci Man” kind of popular. Listening to rap you were on the outside and so music became part of your identity.  Furthermore the music had a message and while I’m not going to spend hours harping on the Rap music being made today, the message part certainly did get lost somewhere along the road from niche culture to big popular culture. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good tracks being made these days, but with the sheer volume of Rap coming out you have to look a long time for it. And look carefully.

That brings me to my last point. My kid and the music that he will listen to. See, I had De La, I had Tribe, I had Hiero and I had Public Enemy. My own dad had Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and a ton of other talented musicians that did what they could to convey a message and be part of something. What music does that today? I know I’m sounding old as hell right now, but again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not being a grumpy old man who excludes all modern music (because I think there is good music being made), but I just don’t see that musical movement today and that’s what I’m wondering. Where is it?

De La Soul. Awesome.

I guess I couldn’t help myself. It’s obviously not a Masters jacket, but he seems to like this one a little better anyhow.

Tiger Woods enjoying himself at the Player's ball..

And I can tell you right now, I’m happy that my kid will remember absolutely nothing of it! It’s not that I think this Christmas will be awful. It’s not that we’re hit by the recession to the point of not enjoying a nice Christmas meal. And it’s not the lack of family traveling in from afar to be with us for this first Christmas as a new family.

It’s the freaking Christmas tree. I bought it the other day and it’s a midget. I don’t know if you have to be politically correct when it comes to height challenged Christmas trees, but I do know that Christmas trees are supposed to be tall, imposing and majestic-looking, full of ornaments and possibly delicious candy.
My tree doesn’t possess any of those qualities whatsoever. It’s just sitting out on the balcony, short and miserable. Of course I’ll do my best to make it acceptable– it’ll be dressed in pretty LEDs, red and golden balls and a top ornament that I think is a glittery golden angel.

Still, there’s nothing I can do about its height and sadly nothing I can do about the lack of space in our living room for a proper tree. I just have to face it. I’m a Christmas tree apologist. At least for now.

Now that's a Christmas Tree!