Did You Miss Me? No? That's Fine. No Biggie.

I've returned to you, good people of the Internet, and not a moment too soon, I'm sure. What was I doing while I was away? Well, mostly, thinking about baseball.

In a Mediterranean country, not very long ago, my sunburnt family chugged its way through pasta and a €7 jug of rosé and I banged my head against a foreign wifi connection, struggling to tune in New York’s sports radio station WFAN. This was not a good look, maybe, but Matt Harvey was considering throwing a no-hitter and everyone at the table understood. By the time the connection crackled to life, it was clear from Howie Rose's gutpunched tone that something Metsian had happened, and another near no-no was gone.

So: deep breath, and back to vacation mode. Harvey has carried three no-hitters into the seventh this year, and looks sure to throw one at some point this season. Of course, I thought the same thing last May about R.A. Dickey, before Johan Santana’s duct tape shoulder beat him to it, suggesting that Flushing may yet be due for a Shaun Marcum perfect game. What worried me, as I returned to slurping pink wine and slapping away high-class European mosquitos, was the name of the man on the mound. Not his stuff, which flattens hitters like a boulder does Wile E. Coyote. Not his future, which appears bright enough to confound every pessimistic Mets fan urge imaginable.

No, just: he’s Matt Harvey, alias Matt, alias Harvey. Nothing more. No nickname, nothing for short. Full stop.

How can we solve this great player's nickname drought? Read on, at the Classical.

And now it's Friday, it's four o'clock, it's hot as hell in my apartment—I'm gonna take a nap and then make something yummy to drink. Happy weekend, all! 

One Review And Two Heartfelt Bits of Sporpswriting

Been lying awake at night wondering what sorts of things I've been writing? Well, for one thing I just finished a rough draft of a heist play about Parisian chefs. (If you want to read it, let me know. It's good!) But as far as writing for money goes, well, I've been doing a bit of that. For instance, this pulse-pounding review of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney , which wowed audiences last month at Soho Rep.

We shouldn't be surprised that Walt Disney has something up his sleeve. He is a showman, after all, and a showman always keeps something clever in reserve. So when Walt—moustachioed, imperial and cruel—takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, it's natural that it will turn into three, four, seven or eight more. They tumble out of his sleeve, falling to the floor, but somewhere the trick has gone wrong. The hankies are covered in blood. The showman is beginning to die.

Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading Of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, which opened May 9 at Soho Rep and runs through June 9, is a poetic examination of a famous magician's attempt to execute the greatest trick of all: immortality. It's an audacious gambit, and it's clear from the first scene—and the presence of "Death" in the play's title—that he probably won't pull it off. But watching him try has proven one of the most engaging theatrical experiences of the spring.

Pretty good, eh? I've also been doing a bit of writing for The Classical , the website responsible for coining the word sporps—a wacky neologism that I somehow can't seem to get out of my head. For instance, I wrote this appreciation of Mets fringe player Mike Baxter—a sad-faced local kid who was, tragically, demoted on Sunday.

On a pleasant Friday afternoon last April, Mike Baxter misplayed a fly ball. The Mets were on their way to a 4-0 loss to the Phillies, playing the halfhearted and thunderously mediocre baseball that has been their trademark in 2013, when the fly came Baxter’s way. It was a long run, and could have been highlight-reel worthy had he successfully slid to catch it, but Baxter broke late, arriving just in time for the ball to roll towards his shoes. From right field came the shout: “You’re a piece of shit, Baxter!”

The heckler wore a Yankee hat, but even without that, it would have been obvious he wasn’t there to cheer on the Mets. Met fans love Mike Baxter, with the dull, unconditional affection usually reserved for pets, or a favorite, fading t-shirt with stains and a few expanding holes. It’s a love too rare in stadiums. The Yankee fan, after an inning or two cursing the hangdog right fielder, disappeared to watch the Knick game. But the Met fans did not turn away. In the seventh inning, when it was clear the Mets had no interest in winning that night, two young women serenaded Baxter, hollering, “Hey Mike! You’re gorgeous! We love you, Mike!”

Read mas, if you have a moment. It's probably the best thing I wrote last month, if you don't count my famously engaging grocery lists. Also for The Classical , I did an impression of someone who is qualified to write about soccer, producing this (I think pretty nifty) article about John Isner.

During the last weekend of May, New York got walloped with the first heat wave of summer: three days of humidity and haze dense and unremitting enough to make ordinary men sympathize with David Berkowitz. From the moment I stepped out of the climate controlled sanctuary of my bedroom and into a wall of stale, broiling air, the afternoon was doomed. I slithered onto the sofa, dragging a wheelbarrow of iced coffee behind me, and turned on the French Open. I seldom watch tennis, but it just felt right.

This is an urge I hadn’t had, if I’m being honest, since the last time my apartment did its convection oven impression, during last year’s U.S. Open. When warm weather strikes I find it soothing to watch attractive people grunt, leap, and yell at line judges. This doesn’t seem to need defending, but so rudimentary is my knowledge of the sport that it took me until last year to piece together what a break point is—a mystery I might have solved faster if I weren’t so committed to watching tennis only when hungover, heat-stroked or both.

Because it’s free of the grave mythology that bogs down American team sports, tennis can be easy to like and hard to love. I can get quickly invested in a game of football, basketball, or hockey, even if I don’t care about either team. Just pick a uniform, a city, a player to hate, and bellow until one group of meatheads crushes the other. But in tennis, the focus is too close. Those are real people out there—beautiful, talented, mostly European people. What the hell could they have to do with me?

What the hell, indeed. Find out more!

I'll be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so feel free to drunk a hogshead of whiskey and drunkbernate until I return.

At BAM, John Turturro Stars In An Elegant Car Wreck

A couple of years ago, I interviewed John Turturro about his directing.​ Last week, I repeated the trick, this time talking to him about his acting. If you want to read about it, CLICK HERE NOW.

A sample:​

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, once a night, John Turturro has been climbing a steeple. To a quiet drumbeat, he goes hand over hand up the side of a tilting house, and when he reaches the top, he does not beat his chest like King Kong.

“I’m just trying to be careful,” he said last week.

His wife and friends watch from below, panicked and exhilarated, and the audience feels the same, joined together for a few minutes in the timeless tension of wondering whether or not a man is going to fall.

This finale of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which opened May 19 at BAM and plays there through June 9, is not exactly as Ibsen wrote it. In the original, the master builder of the title, Halvard Solness, climbs his tower off-stage, his progress relayed by those below, with thrilling dialogue like, “He climbs and climbs. He will soon be at the top now.” For this stripped-down production, director Andrei Belgrader puts the tower on stage, and keeps the worst of Ibsen’s dialogue off it. Five years ago, in BAM’sEndgame, Mr. Belgrader and Mr. Turturro were praised for finding unexpected humor in Beckett, and here they have worked a similar miracle: wringing life from one of the dreariest playwrights in the canon. This is a Master Builder for the gut, not the mind.

I Am A Writer And Here Are Things That I Wrote

Did you know I am a professional writer? That's right. I type up words—words just like these—and then I put them in a special, top secret order, and mail them off to companies who pay me for them. Truly, it is a wacky life.​

Lately I have been so busy writing things professionally that I haven't had time to tell you about them on this, my blog. Allow me to catch you up, in reverse chronological order, because we writers are saucy like that.​

First, I reviewed Here Lies Love​ for Howlround​, a wonderful website whose name is hard to say out loud. (It's not quite The Rural Juror​, but it's a toughie.) If you click on that link, you can see a picture of me wearing a cat. I talked about this play a bit after I saw it, and what it was like to dance next to David Byrne, but now you can see my fully-fleshed-out critical whatnots. Here is a sample:

Eight drumbeats thud out, a martial pulse that sounds suspiciously like the famous opening bass line to a Talking Heads classic. Two lovers march towards each other through the crowd, and the audience wonders—“They’re not covering ‘Psycho Killer,’ are they? They wouldn't dare!” And then the lovers kiss, the room explodes in disco, and “Psycho Killer” is a distant memory.

Until that moment, I was wondering if David Byrne was the only reason anyone had come to Here Lies Love, the former Talking Head’s new musical, which plays at the Public Theater through June 2. In the last decade, Byrne has dabbled in conceptual art, producing work like 2008’s Playing the Building, a pleasant-enough art installation in southern Manhattan that probably did not deserve the attention drawn by its creator’s name. In his eagerness to cross genres, Byrne is like a much more talented, much less irritating James Franco. Conceptual art is best left to the professionals, but rock is Byrne's beat, and Here Lies Love is a sparkling reminder of why he became a downtown icon in the first place. His name may get them in the door, but the music will make them stay.

​Pretty good, eh? If you like that, you'll love this article I wrote for the Observer​ about Europa Editions, a scrappy independent publisher whose new line of World Noir makes me so happy I could just sneeze. Seriously, I read almost nothing but crime fiction, and these guys have got the goods.

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests,Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

The kitchen is an escape for this harried gumshoe, but Total Chaos, part of author Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy, is not mere escapist literature. Mr. Izzo used detective fiction to shine a light on France’s rugged southern port and the corruption that turned his stunning hometown into one of the most dangerous cities in Western Europe. The city loved him for it, and when he died in 2000, Marseilles’s bookstores closed their doors and filled their shop windows with Mr. Izzo’s pioneering novels.

​Pretty heavy stuff? So heavy that maybe you'd like to read something about sports? Or, since this article is on The Classical, perhaps I should say sporps. I write about the proposed Flushing Meadows MLS stadium, and why handing it over to one of English soccer's many billionaires is a totally unfun idea.

This is the dead period in the English Premier League. The title race ended weeks ago, with Manchester United claiming their eleventy-millionth championship in honor of retiring rage-legend Sir Alex Ferguson. At the end, there was nothing left to wonder about but whether or not Wigan Athletic will escape relegation. Coming as it does with the start of spring, this annual tepid period carries a pleasant taste of the English countryside—village greens and quiet pubs and all the other stuff Ray Davies just couldn't get out of his system. But for Manchester City, who will finish second this year, it is a time of seething discontent.

Last May, the blue half of Manchester won its first title since 1966, in five minutes of madness that made the madcap end to the 2011 baseball season look contrived. (Relive it here, accompanied for good or ill by the musical stylings of The Verve.) Manchester City won the FA Cup the year before, and will try for it again this weekend, taking on hard-luck Wigan in a match as well balanced as Goliath vs. David’s asthmatic younger brother. With all their recent success, the placid American fan would expect them to be happy. “You can’t win them all,” we tell them, naively. But if City loses on Saturday, a dapper gent named Roberto Mancini will probably be out of a job. The Premier League is no place for sentiment.

And in a league where a bad season is rewarded with relegation, there is no such thing as rebuilding. (Jeff Fisher, for instance, would not have lasted in England.) Sheikh Mansour, City’s doe-eyed billionaire owner, has dumped nearly half-a-billion pounds into the club, and has no interest in passing a springtime afternoon over a pint of bitter, wistfully crooning, “Wait ‘till next year.” The Premier League system is a mad one, driven by greed unheard of in American sports. So it is maybe or maybe not a good thing that it appears to be on its way to Flushing.

​What's that? You want more? Well I just remembered that I never linked to my Richard Foreman profile on here. Lordy, have I been slacking. It's got a pretty good lede:

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?”

The actors offered more suggestions—“blind rage,” “mad rage” “octopus rage”—but their director’s attention had shifted to the lightboard. As the actors waited, he conferred with his staff of 10—some Public employees, some interns—flipping through light cues and eventually casting the theater into darkness. By the time the lights were sorted, and he had settled on “incalculable rage … Rage!” it was time to break for lunch.

The Ipcress Bean, Ground As Fine As I Like

It's not cool to grind your own coffee. It's not uncool. It's just a thing lots of people do every morning, myself included. Having a strong opinion of whether or not a person should grind their own coffee is one of those things that marks a person as psychotic. If other people want to drink chock full o' nuts that they keep in their freezer, good for them. They're saving money, and they're as happy as I am. Probably happier, in fact, since they have slightly more money.

​But I like grinding my own beans. It's fun, it makes a loud noise, and how often in your life do you get the opportunity to pulverize something into flakes? As someone with no  strong feelings about coffee—I'm a tea man—this seems odd, but it's not something I've ever pursued. Pursuing things is not something I like to do before I get my coffee.

While grinding beans this morning—beans that I could tell you nothing​ about, except that they are from across the street and turn into coffee if you dump hot water on them—I had a flash. A memory-thing. I grind beans because of The Ipcress File​.

I watched that Michael Caine spy thriller sometime in high school, in the depths of a Caine obsession that would lead to Zulu​ and Alfie​ and The Italian Job​ and whatever else my movie store had. The Ipcress File​ is a very odd movie, a psychedelic secret agent...something. It was a bit much for teenage me. But the opening sequence stuck with me.

Apparently, in the '60s, you could tell a lot about a person by how he prepared his coffee. Owning an electric grinder must have been very mod when Michael Caine became a star, because it's the first thing we see his secret agent doing. Not fiddling with a cocktail shaker, not checking the clip on his Walther—he's grinding coffee. This is a hip secret agent, we learn. A bachelor who knows how to take care of himself. A bachelor who knows how to take care of England.​

​I'm no secret agent. (If I were, I wouldn't tell you.) But in a teenage desire to become one, I seem to have internalized a simple axiom. Spies grind coffee, and I should too.

Huh.​

On Shakespeare Day, Eulogies From Hamlet & Marlena

It doesn't take much prodding for me to praise Orson Welles. The man was the original studio system martyr—a dynamo whose personality made him irresistible, and also made it impossible for him to get work. He was always fun to watch on screen—I mean, just look at that grin!—​but the man knew how to write, too. I've been thinking about Touch of Evil​ a lot lately. Not the famous opening tracking shot, nor the inexplicably less famous second tracking shot, but the ending, which never fails to give me chills.

​Orson's corrupt sheriff, a sinister fat man whose weight Welles was not more than a decade away from, lies face down, dead in a gully. Marlene Dietrich, the mealy-mouthed fortune teller who was the only person who liked him, watches on, stone faced, and delivers the finest movie eulogy of all time. "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

The ending's ambivalence ​recalls that of The Third Man​. The monster, both played by Orson Welles, is dead—killed by the only man in the world who loved him. Just in case he's feeling a little bit too good about his crusade, though, the dead man's woman makes sure he knows that he hasn't done anything great. Yeah, you killed the bad guy. But the bad guy was Orson Welles, dammit, and he was the most fun part of this movie!

But it also recalls a couple of Shakespearean eulogies, one of which I was reminded of this morning by Super Theater Twitter Guy Jonathan Mandell.​

"He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again." (Hamlet) Shakespeare, born 439 years ago today.

— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) April 23, 2013

​There are a lot of ways to deliver that line, which Hamlet uses to remember the murdered father whom he is about to kinda-maybe-sorta-think about avenging. Taken with Dietrich's Central European ambivalence, it offers the same, "I don't know—what's the point of mourning the dead?" shrug. If Hamlet is that ambivalent to his father, well, I get why he's not racing to the armory in search of an uncle killing sword.

I saw Julius Caesar​ at BAM a couple of weeks ago. It's a lush production, fuzzy at the start, but furiously clear by the time the murderin' starts. At the end, when the stage is covered with the traditionally Shakespearean corpse-pile, we get this eulogy, over the corpse of Brutus: "His life was gentle, and the elements/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world 'This was a man!'"

​I love it. I don't know how these all connect, exactly, and I won't force it. But I do know that if the best you can say for the dead is, "Well...he was a man," perhaps the eulogy business is not for you. The press release for Julius Caesar​ touted it as something revolutionary, but an all-black Shakespearean tragedy set in tropical climate is hardly new. Orson Welles did that with Macbeth​ in 1936, a reminder that while he may have been a few hundred years behind Shakespeare, he was decades ahead of everyone else.

Just for grins, I looked up the Times'​ original review of Welles so-called "voodoo Macbeth.​" It is, how shall we say, really fucking racist. Critic Brooks Atkinson—he of the eponymous theater—tells us that the cast in this "darktown version" of Shakespeare's tragedy "have conjured [a] weird, vari-colored raree-show out of the fine stuffs of the theatre and the ferocity of Negro acting." The costumes are "an idealization of Negro extravagance," and the staging is done "with an eye to the animalism of the setting." But though the play offers "sensuous, black-blooded vitality," it "has missed the sweep and scope of a poetic tragedy." This is my favorite bit (emphasis mine)​:

As Macbeth, Jack Carter is a fine figure of a Negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy. He has no command of poetry or character.

Oof.​ Just...oof.

There's been quite a lot of chatter lately—and probably for decades—about the death of theater criticism. Asked to eulogize the golden age of New York criticism, I can't give anything more than a Dietrichian shrug. What does it matter what you say about plays?

It Is Fun To Dance Beside David Byrne

When I was in 9th grade, my favorite album (non-ironic) was Stop Making Sense​, and my favorite television show (semi-ironic) was Degrass​i​. Both Talking Heads and Degrassi had guitar players: one of them a bipolar ham, the other a high-minded goofball with suspiciously dancin' feet. Last night, I saw both of these guitar players.

I'm reviewing Here Lies Love​, David Byrne's new musical, for Howlround's​ new NewCrit program. (I realized last night that Howlround is really hard to say—even worse than Rural Juror​. New NewCrit is just as bad.) To that end, I scored a ticket to last night's opening at the Public. I thought the show was still in previews. If I'd realized it was opening night, I would have dressed a little better. If I'd known this was an option, I'd have made like David Byrne, and worn a jumpsuit.

For details on the production, you'll have to wait on my review, which won't run until it's been written. (And it won't be written until after lunch, at the very least.) But I can say that David Byrne likes his new musical, and so do I. He spent the whole show dancing, bobbing his head, and singing along, providing a nice visual for what a relevant sixty year-old rock star looks like. Seeing him in a theater is not much of a novelty. There's a How I Met Your Mother ​bit about how every New Yorker has seen Woody Allen—that's how I feel about Byrne. I've seen him perform, seen him riding his bike, and seen him (for some reason) give a Powerpoint presentation about architecture. Last night, I got to see him have a very good time.​​

At one point during the play, the audience is forced to line dance. I am okay at dancing, but awful at following instructions, and felt very awkward the entire time. So did everyone else, besides David Byrne, who had presumably had time to practice. He danced behind me, having a good time, but not quite as good a time as the elderly Filipino man who was dancing to my right. ​

After the show ended, the audience didn't want to leave. Filing down to the lobby, we found ourselves being given cocktails, and welcomed to an after party for which I felt distinctly under dressed and quite happy to attend. Craig from Degrassi, who spent the entire play looking ashen faced and confused, was gone by this point. I drank four or five piña coladas, and left after an hour or so, when the sugar in the not-very-boozy cocktails started to make my teeth hurt. I had a marvelous time, and so did David Byrne, and it makes me happy to know that we both enjoyed our Sunday evenings for somewhat similar reasons.

An Hour Or So Later...​

​I just realized this post needs some music. Because the above image made me think of it:

Video from Talking Heads "Naked" 1988. Enjoy sound and vision.

Man, I love this song.​

Morning Thoughts on The Amphitheater Of My Dreams

Often, the dreams I remember best are the ordinary ones. Entirely too often, my unconscious entertains my sleeping self with images of commuting, so that when I wake in the morning, I feel like I just got off an eight hour subway ride. (That's where Bronx Bound​ came from, I think.) Sometimes this is stressful, sometimes its fun. Last night it was a blast, as I dreamt I was riding the subway all over town to meet a buddy of mine, and kept bumping into fun people from high school. The transit details were  accurate in a way they usually aren't—no dragons in the conductor's booth here—right down to a dramatic moment as we rode the F train around the bend at the Smith Ave/9th Street stop.

I looked out the window and saw an amphitheater in Gowanus—a slightly run down, wood-and-steel bandshell, with seats for maybe eighty people and a stage appropriate for theater and film. It was a grey night, and the crowd was mostly empty—that the place was located underneath the train tracks probably didn't help—but I defended the theater to my friends. "Go there on a hot summer night," I said, "and it's the best place to watch theater in New York."​

I woke up sorry it wasn't real. There are a few excellent performance spaces in the area around the Gowanus canal, but because the neighborhood was until quite recently a fetid stinkpot, there are few places to be entertained outdoors. (Gowanus Grove is a notable exception. I've thought about going a few times, but have never seen the point of paying a $10 cover to stand around outside. You can do that for free in parks.) And aside from the beleaguered Brooklyn Lyceum, there are no grand stages anywhere in the neighborhood. This imaginary amphitheater solves all those problems.

Programming would be confined to summer months. If we had heat lamps, maybe we could stretch it into the fall. In a typical week, we'd have one or two plays running in rep, with film screenings on weekend nights and matinees during the day. We could have concerts, late night dance parties—anything and everything to piss off the neighbors and draw tourists from North Brooklyn. There would be a bar in the front, obviously, and enough artisan lightbulbs and distressed iron to earn us two or three Times​ style section gushes—"Hipster Theater, Under The Summer Sky"—in the first month of programming. It wouldn't take long for this to become a warm-weather institution, where people come for the party, stay for the theater, and never even notice that they're enjoying a marginal art form.

​All I need to make this work is a lot of money and a decade or two experience running a performing arts space. Until the Brooklyn gods smile down on this project, I'll have to content myself by hoping to return to my amphitheater in my dreams. Tonight I hope I visit it on a rainy night, when the canvas tarp has been run out, and the audience is huddled together, intent on the performance, rain in the background and the Gowanus Canal oozing along just a few blocks away.

A Phrase To Throw Under Any Bus You Can Find

As far as I'm concerned, reality TV—Worst Cooks in America excepted—is part of the problem. What problem? Oh, I don't know. All of them? Off the top of my head, it's easy to blame bad reality programming for the dumbing down of entertainment, the decline in scripted television, the continued survival of checkout line tabloids, and anything else  that's bothering me at the moment. But one thing has been irking me in particular lately, and that's the abuse of a specific phrase.

A week or two ago, I seemed to spend the entire weekend washing the dishes. While I was consumed with this oddly monumental task, my girlfriend amused herself in the other room, indulging in a consciousness-destroying cocktail of The Sims and a variety of housewives, each more real than the last. The toilet paper I crammed into my ears did not create a tight enough seal, forcing me to listen over the roar of my sink to hours and hours of only on Bravo-style "drama."​

And every five or six minutes, it seemed, someone was accusing someone else of throwing them under the bus. Here is a typical exchange, from a drama-filled house party that the producers stretched out over two episodes:​

Housewife 1: "I don't want to throw anybody under the bus."

Housewife 2: "You don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but she's throwing all of us under the bus."

Housewife 3: "She's throwing all of us under the bus."

​There are a lot of words and phrases that have been abused by reality television—drama itself being one of them—but none sticks in your ear more than this particularly ugly bit of public-transit related metaphor. It's become popular despite its length, its awkwardness, and the fuzziness of its meaning. Actually, it's meaning shouldn't be fuzzy. In its purest form, I think the phrase means something like "to make a scapegoat of." But in its current diluted state, as used by every reality show contestant from Beverly Hills to Hells Kitchen and beyond, it seems to mean "betray," "work against," or "do something I didn't like." 

Reality TV feeds on petty people overreacting to minor disagreements. To get a sense of how asinine these storylines can get, just count how often this phrase is used. If you hear someone accuse someone else of throwing them under the bus, you know three things:

1. The speaker is stupid.
2. The disagreement is meaningless.​
3. You should check and see what else is on your DVR.​

The abuse of this particular phrase is a shame because, used sparingly, it evokes quite an effective image. If you saw one Beverly Hills shrew literally throw another underneath a Los Angeles Metro bus, you would have to think, "Boy! Those housewives are really angry at each other!" But instead, the phrase is meaningless—indicative of nothing beyond another hour wasted on the couch.​

Last Week I Was Cold, But Not Too Cold To Type

Continuing my tradition of breaking news, last week I covered the shocking development that it is no fun to be cold at a baseball game.​ Seriously, though, it was goddamned freezing:

How cold was the stadium on Sunday? The weatherman says 54 degrees with winds gusting as high as 44 miles-per-hour. To get a sense of how that felt, try this: encase your genitals in ice, dangle them in front of a battery of leafblowers, and see if you feel like watching Lucas Duda stumble after fly balls.

Despite the gale, the upper deck was crowded, because the Mets had spent the week giving away tickets on Twitter. No strings attached—follow @Mets on Twitter, get a ticket to watch the actual Mets play the Marlins. The unpaid crowd got its money's worth. Dressed for a sunny spring day, they found instead that they had joined the Shackleton expedition. Children shivered through plastic hats full of ice cream. Whirlwinds of garbage swirled ghostly across the infield. Pigeons fought to stay aloft. It was baseball in April, and that is what it’s like.

​Check it out if you want to shiver a little. Amazingly, as cold as that game was—and it really was awful, the coldest I've ever been at a sporting event—the Mets are currently a bit chillier. They nearly got snowed out in Minneapolis last week, and are now in Colorado, a famously warm place. Last night they got snowed out, today they might get snowed out, and if they are able to play at all, it could get down to as little as 9°. Jeepers!