Author: Hoss

We Need an IMDB for Commercials

I’m sending this out into the internet ether in hopes of a positive response…

IMHO, IMDB is one of the greatest things about the internet. Long gone are the days when we would  spend an entire movie or a TV show thinking “what have I seen this actor in?”

So please internet, someone create an IMDB for the background music in commercials.

Most commercials play just the melody, tweak it a bit, and have some person speaking over it, and you can almost place the song, but not quite. It’s sooooooo frustrating and unnecessary in the age of information.

Please fix this internet. Thank you in advance.

Sincerely, your humble servant,
Hoss

The first PMRC Villian-20 years later

That fro is LEGIT!!!!

Unfortunately, this man’s half-brother and main heir died last night, which puts his music catalog in even murkier waters.

It’s only a matter of time before Darling Nikki’s guitar will be the background music in granola bar advertisements.

As a side note, a big thanks to Tipper Gore and the rest of the PMRC for eliminating foul language in music. Great work.

The Intersection of Cheap Wine and 80’s Music

From the file titled “Lyrics I’ve heard a thousand times and never really paid attention to, until today, and now I can’t stop thinking about them.”, I give you Axl Rose from the classic “Night Train” referring to a bottle of Night Train…

“Wake up late
Honey put on your clothes
Take your credit card to the liquor store
That’s one for you and
Two for me.”

Circa 1987 a bottle of Night Train costs about $2 after tax. Life is soooo bad in this song for the protagonist, he can’t even pay for his own Night Train, AND he can’t even charge it, so he needs someone else to charge it for him. Also, credit standards were much tighter in those days, so how did this young lady procure a credit card? And if she is a job-having, permanent address, good-credit, kind-of-gal, then what is she doing with a dude who doesn’t have $2 for his own cheap wine?

Obviously middle-aged me is much less fun than younger me.

Drop-off Dystopia

Typically I perform the pick-up portion of our children’s daily school shuttle service. My better half does the drop-off.

Pick-up is GREAT. Parents are finished with work, some are already halfway through their second cocktail, maybe they have already stopped at their favorite dispensary, I don’t know. But everyone seems relaxed, and all of the children are excited about being picked-up.

Recently I’ve been switched to drop-off duty. Unfortunately, drop-off duty is the exact opposite of pick-up duty. Essentially, it’s a dystopian Mad Max hellscape in the mornings. Everyone is cranky, surly, and apparently always behind schedule.

A-N-G-R-Y Mornings

This morning, I watched two adult women/moms scrap it out over a parking space. (when many others were available) It was a pretty ugly scene for a Newport Beach fight, there was Lululemon and Uggs fur flying everywhere. Scary stuff.

I watched from the comfort of my car. 1-so I could talk to the boys about how this is bad behavior, and 2- So I could jam out to LL’s Going Back to Cali which was on the 80’s on 8.

Don’t judge. A person has to find their own bliss in Drop-off Dystopia.

The Puddin’ Pop Man is baaaaack.

I’ve been away for a while, but rather than give a lengthy reason why, I’d rather just make a smooth and quick transition into a topic, and just move forward from there.

You know who else has been gone for a while? Bill Cosby. Smooth enough?

Jury selection started yesterday, Monday May 22, in the trial that will soon place the final dagger into the hearts of an entire generation who grew up admiring and respecting the comedian.

With Donald Trump in the White House and Bill Cosby on trial for serial sexual assault, it feels like the 80’s turned into an internet troll hell-bent on destroying all of our pleasant memories from that time long ago.

One of those pleasant memories from the 80’s.

 

Remember, there were only a few media options in the 80’s, and Cosby DOMINATED the most popular medium, television. He owned Thursday night. Kids that grew-up in the 80’s pictured Cosby as the ultimate father figure and all-around “good” man. Not just the character Bill played on the show, but actual Cosby himself took on these admirable qualities.

It was easy to confuse real-life Cosby from fictional Cosby. Many of the shows’ plots were taken directly from his stand-up routines, or from his book. Blurring the lines further, the fictional Cosby even wore a pin on the fictional show, honoring real-life Cosby’s friend, Sammy Davis Jr., who died in real life.

Fast forward two decades, directly after the birth of my first son, the nights were often filled with more feeding than sleeping. When breast feeding, there aren’t many other activities one can engage in, except consume electronic media. During this time period, my lovely wife worked her way through several Netflix shows in the wee hours of the night. But one of her favorite watching destinations was Cosby Show reruns.

I often watched them with her and we would talk about how great it will be when our son can watch the show with us. I even imagined when my children get older and become too cocky about their ability to live on their own, replaying the famous scene where the family makes Theo live off of a strict budget of Monopoly money.

Unfortunately, between breastfeeding age and the time my son would be old enough to watch TV, the Cosby scandal broke. I imagine millions of other 80’s children had the same cosby-feuled aspirations that I once had. Unfortunately, those images have now been torn to shreds, lit on fire, buried 15 feet underground, and then had an atomic bomb dropped on them.

Cosby himself is back to remove even the slightest hint of innocence or self-respect he may have left. In a recent Sirius Radio interview with Michael Smerconish, the comedian was asked why he didn’t want to testify. Cosby replied, “I just don’t want to sit there and have to figure out what I believe is a truthful answer, as to whether or not I’m opening up a can of something that makes my lawyers scramble.” In other words, I can’t keep all of my lies straight, so I’m not going to say anything.

As if his statements even carry any weight at all anymore. This is one of the biggest He said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said , she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said competition ever.

At trial, the vileness of this monster will come out, and hopefully his victims will finally know justice and a bit of peace.

Death by 1,000 Meetings

Limiting screen time is a current concern for a large percentage of parents. When I was a kid, my screen time was also regulated. Not by my parental units, but by the fact that we only had access to three channels, and except for Saturday morning, the programming was completely geared toward adults. It’s tough to get a seven year old to appreciate the humor of “All in the Family” long enough to sit through 30 minutes with commercials.

In contrast, my four year old has an unlimited supply of fun or educational cartoons available, sans commercials, 24/7.

But my screen time was also limited by the communication I received from society at large, which essentially boiled down to “Don’t watch TV, it will rot your brain.” The message was clear, time spent watching Voltron, Saved by the Bell, and wrastlin’ were all monumental wastes of time, even for children.

While I accepted the rhetoric, I still logged PLENTY of hours on the couch during my teen and early Twenties—mostly nursing hangovers. While I enjoyed the leisure of wasting entire afternoons watching Real World marathons, society’s message often nagged at me, even to the point of diminishing my enjoyment. “You’re wasting your time” was always present in the back of my conscious.

Then I became an adult.

And as an adult, I have watched millions of wasted man hours in the trivial pursuit of Corporate America’s favorite pastime… meetings.

meeting 1

Any human who has spent any amount of time behind cubicle walls knows the story of wasted hours. Although every meeting has different variables, so many of them have the same unpleasant and unproductive qualities: topic is too vague, no agenda, boring, tedious, doesn’t accomplish anything, and most effective meetings achieve the same results as a well-crafted two paragraph email.

Worker bees have also perfected a plethora of strategies to occupy themselves during meetings from hell. There’s the doodler, the note taker, the phone checker, the talker, and then there’s the silent type that are daydreaming of the beach, the mountains, or maybe even thinking about a past episode of Saved by the Bell. Myself, I’m a pincher. I pinch myself to stay awake, and to avoid screaming “You’re wasting my time!” as I turn over a table, and storm out of a bad meeting.

SAVED BY THE BELL -- Season 2 -- Pictured: (l-r) Mario Lopez as Alabert Clifford 'A.C.' Slater, Dennis Haskins as Mr. Richard Belding, Lark Voorhies as Lisa Turtle, Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski, Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano, Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zachary 'Zach' Morris, Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers -- Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank
SAVED BY THE BELL Pictured: (l-r) Mario Lopez as Alabert Clifford ‘A.C.’ Slater, Dennis Haskins as Mr. Richard Belding, Lark Voorhies as Lisa Turtle, Tiffani Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski, Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano, Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zachary ‘Zach’ Morris, Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers — Photo by: NBCU Photo Bank

There are a plethora of blog posts and books with fantastic strategies for harnessing the power of meetings. But I have found the most effective way is to simply avoid them—at all costs.

While this may prove trickier to accomplish given your specific employment status, reduction and even elimination of meetings should be the goal. The marketing master, Seth Godin, provides some excellent strategies on meeting improvement and elimination here and here.

As an entrepreneur, I’m involved in different segments of the economy, and it’s interesting to see what role meetings play in various industries. For example, the manufacturing companies I monitor all have essential operational meetings to start and conclude every week. These gatherings are necessarily repetitive, but efficient. In essence, manufacturing processes constantly need tweaked and the line needs monitored, these factors reduce needless meetings.

Typically service industries have less meetings due to the fact that their employees are usually actively serving their customers. Finally, there are the governmental meetings I’m sometimes forced to attend. While I believe the role of a modern day government should be active and effective, in reality, government is only an accumulation of other human beings trapped inside of one non-stop meeting. If you have to attend governmental meetings, my only advice is to bring plenty of reading material. Sorry.

Some meetings are essential in moving the ball forward, but most are not. The ones that are time wasters need to be treated as such, and removed. Not tweaked, streamlined, or revamped, but eliminated.

At the end of the day, you can take control of your own time. For example, I’m skipping a meeting right now, and watching old episodes of Voltron on YouTube.

The Olympics and Steroid Mania

Once again the Summer Olympics are almost upon us, which means two weeks of nonstop action along with two weeks of nonstop reporting about steroid related rules infractions. This follows the slew of disqualifications at UFC 200—if a few more fighters would have been ruled out, Dana White would have needed to enter the Octagon himself.

I have a completely illogical and indefensible view of how steroids should be used in sports.

I think they should be outlawed in baseball, basketball, hockey, boxing, mma, and let the NFL keep sneaking whatever they currently do.

But for the Olympics, bring them on. Stop the record books where they are, and let’s truly test the limits of human ability.

strong baby

I want to see some Russian dude push two tons over his head. I want to see some woman run the 100 meters in 7 seconds. I want to see someone put the shot out of the infield.

From everything we’ve learned from Lance Armstrong and the Russian weight program, an extremely high % of athletes are using them anyway (gasp!)  (The key is not getting caught), then why not make their use ubiquitous?

Besides, steroids don’t make you bigger, faster, and stronger, they mainly help you recover. You can take all the ‘roids you can find, not work out, and still be an out-of-shape piece-of-shit.

I’m old, and like many old men these days, my doctor will start prescribing hgh to me in a few years. And yet, no one will care.  So why not load up Usain Bolt, and let the man do something the entire world will gasp at?

I’m 100% certain most people disagree (what about the children?). But, I’d still like to see it. Why not?