Saturday Night Gone

Saturday Night Live is supposedly cutting down its cast before the show returns to the air in September. Several different news reports have come out today and yesterday, but they all contain a different set of names.

If I had to get rid of four Not Ready for Prime Time Players, I'd boot Horatio Sanz, Finesse Mitchell, Bill Hader and Jason Suediis (I don't even know what he looks like). All are unfunny and Sanz couldn't not flub a line/break character if his life depended on it. If I had my way, I'd boot the entire cast, crew, and producers and broadcast an hour and a half of static. I bet that hour and a half of static would be a lot more funny that an episode of SNL. A colonoscopy is probably more funny than an episode of SNL these days.

NBC should take a queue from ABC, which will no longer be broadcasting Monday Night Football -- it's OK to do away with your network institutions. When the funniest thing you've broadcast in several years (Lazy Sunday) is a taped piece written by non-staff writers, you have a problem.

Boring Simmons

I'm not sure from whence my wrath for Bill Simmons came, but today's "article" is another straw to break a camel's back. Maybe it's an ESPN.com directive that limits his output, but I doubt it, given that he still has the "More Cowbell" blog running, despite no posts since mid-March.

In the last month, Simmons has blessed us with a whopping 12 pieces including two mailbags, four re-posts of old articles and two ESPN the Magazine pieces.

Mailbags are, for lack of a better term, mixed bags. They're pretty entertaining, but they're only half written by the man. They're an easy out for someone who doesn't feel like expounding on one topic for two dozen paragraphs. Instead, it's one paragraph on two dozen topics. Lame.

So we're stuck with four original, full length articles in the last month. It smacks of laziness and creative apathy. Bill: if you have trouble writing about topics that don't relate either to the NBA or anything that took place in the 1990s, why not change your moniker to "The Lazy-Ass Nearly Anything But Sports Guy"?

I want to like The Artist Formerly Known as the Boston Sports Guy, but it's getting harder and harder every 2-3 days. Maybe a sabbatical to anywhere except Las Vegas is needed.

Moving

When it comes to moving, the phrase "Time is Money" goes out the window. In an effort to save as much money as possible, my ladyfriend and I have spent almost all of our free time packing boxes, loading cards, and trudging items up and down hallways and staircases over the last couple of weeks. Couple this activity with several weddings, birthdays and other summer parties and you get one very exhausted, angry, young Bostonian. The movers are coming this weekend, but who knows when we'll actually finish "moving".

I will miss the Davis Square area quite a bit. Somerville has gotten a bad rap the last decade or so that is undeserved. Much of the city is clean, well lit and all the squares have great restaurants and bars. Having lived on both sides of the Charles, I'll take Somerville and Cambridge over the bedbug/college student infested shithole of Allston and Brighton any day. Plus, my car insurance premium is less.

Return to Form

It's been four weeks since I last posted anything, and the shrinking portion of my brain that is my creative side is calling me to action. Work has been busy, life has been busy over the last four weeks, so deal with it.

Here are some topics that have been on my mind:

The official sport of Massachusetts is basketball. The Boston Globe immediately interviews whiny Red Sox fans who have nothing better to do than complain that the Sox got the shaft.
Basketball was invented in Springfield, the Celtics are the winningest sports franchise in the state, and the sport is popular across economic and race divisions. You don't see a lot of midnight baseball games going on. It's played the world over (odd for Massachusetts to pick something that does NOT further its isolation from the rest of the country). If this were to happen anytime from 1900-1986, everyone would have agreed with the decision. It's actually refreshing for once that the Red Sox are not central to a sports story in New England. I eagerly anticipate a Red Sox press conference to assure me that the Red Sox still exist in the hearts and minds of Celtics, Patriots and Bruins fans everywhere.

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Speaking of baseball, the Red Sox aren't doing so well as of late (though they did sweep the lowly Orioles -- something they should have done against both Tampa Bay and Kansas City -- despite mostly mediocre performances from their starting pitchers and bullpen). If this is the first, true "lost" season for the new ownership/Theo, I wonder how long it will take them to realize it? Do they push Curt Schilling to make every start or do they experiment with Papelbon extending his appearances and having Craig Hansen close? Do they rush Trot Nixon or Jason Varitek back from the DL or do they audition some of the young'ns that will eventually take Tek and Trot's places in the starting lineup in a couple years?

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Al Jefferson's season might already be lost. A year ago, he was going to be the next savior of the franchise. Now, he's riding a stationary bike and trying not to eat fried foods. I don't think the Celtics should cut their losses just yet, especially since they picked up his option for 07-08, but this is getting ridiculous. Every year it looks like the only way for the Celtics to go is forward, but trading for Sebastian Telfair (essentially a third year rookie) and missing out on an Al Iverson deal -- or any deal for a veteran for that matter -- is yet another painful step backwards.

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Is anyone else done with the Sports Guy? I used to gobble up every word he wrote from his AOL days back in the mid-late nineties to his jump to ESPN.com to today, but I think I'm finally over it. His "this is the way it should be, according to Bill" attitude and tired references to pop-culture are becoming stale. When he first started writing for ESPN.com and everyone was having a sportsgasm when a new article came out, I was angry because I felt that I had "discovered" him when he wrote for Digital City Boston. Now -- you can have him. He's gone Hollywood. He's mailing it in. The fact that someone developed a "write your own Sports Guy column" generator proves the point that he's fallen prone to predictability. Plus he's written like four columns in the last month. If I'm writing a blog for free and posting a few times a week (at my height), how hard is it for someone who's actually paid by the word? Does anyone know any pre-mainstream Sports Guy-type writers out there that I can get into?

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I just spent the last week listening to every Rolling Stones studio album in chronological order and now I don't know what to make of them. Half their output is just irrelevant. Poor Ron Wood -- the only relevant Stones album he can call his own is Some Girls. I doubt he's proud of Dirty Work. Surprisingly, their latest effort, A Bigger Bang, is halfway decent. The problem with the Stones is that they are not an album band. They are a singles band that puts out albums. Half of their early releases (and even all the way up to 1981's Tattoo You) consisted of several singles, blues covers and previous studio recordings. Rarely did the Stones enter the studio with a plan to put together an actual album of consistent material.

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NBC actually did something somewhat out of the box by releasing the pilot episodes to two new series (Studio 60 on Sunset Strip and Kidnapped) on DVD this past week, a month before their actual airdates. Too bad both series aren't that great. Maybe releasing 2-3 episodes would have resulted in a more positive critical impact from their target audiences. Pilots are tricky -- they exist to introduce characters and set up a premise for the series. It would be hard to view a pilot as a run of the mill episode. The pilot plus a second or third episode would go a long way in grabbing more interest simply by developing things by just a little. Too bad the advertisers would never allow it.