Modernising Sports

As our world continues its relentless march towards eventual ragnarrok or supernova oblivion (depending on your point of view) my 6 readers have begun asking themselves the big questions:

How can we achieve world peace?

What to do about all the pollution and stuff?

When will bigmrjosh increase the awesomeness of our tired, old sporting pursuits?

Well I can only answer two of those questions. Let’s start with sports!

Sports, right? They’ve been around for a while. We don’t know who for sure originally invented sports, but we do know that sports used to be cool. Way cooler than it is today. The Aztecs or the Mayans or something (meticulously researched) used to play their version of basketball with the heads of defeated warriors. Dribbling the ball would have been a problem... but otherwise, hell yeah! Thanks to our namby pamby fear of dismembered heads and limbs getting snapped like kindling, we have dumbed down our sporting pursuits ever since. I’m here to fix that. I’m going to do for sports the same thing I did for the cat that peed in my washing basket: kick it hard into the future. I’m going to modernise sports. Buckle up.

Wrestling

When I called the wrestling hotline and declared my intention of creating a new modern wrestling league, the guy at the other end wanted to know if I had come up with my acronym. I slapped my head with exasperation. Of course! It’s an unwritten law that all wrestling leagues must be preceded by an obscure acronym. Three letter acronyms like WWF or ECW are for wimps. I went the four.

In the spirit of honesty, I have forged the Straight Out The Closet (SOTC) Wrestling Federation (TM). Featuring only those athletes most eager to be oiled up and thrown at another oily dude.

I haven’t even oiled up yet! GOD I WANT YOU ON ME!

I don't know how watching two guys in mankinis pretend to fight but actually just rub their balls all over each other came to be considered a sport, but if you're a fan you might as well just admit it: you like the luncheon truncheon. And I have yet to meet a real woman who enjoys the 'sport' of wrestling.

V8 Supercars

If there’s one thing NZers with mullets love, it’s the V8s. For those of us with jobs: the classic V8 setup consists of 30 cars driving around a circular track 1600 times for the chance to become ultimate circle driving champion. Boring.

Now, usually if you like the V8s you dropped out of primary school, so you can’t afford to construct a circular track for your own car racing amusement. Don’t worry! The New Zealand Government thought of everything, and they have built a track for you, at tax payer expense. We call it SH1.

Even though I only invented this sport 5 minutes ago, it’s already blowing up. It’s going to be huge. I know this because I see it happening every time I go to Auckland. Next time a 17-year-old overtakes me at 138kph I must remember to roll down my window and yell, “stop stepping on my intellectual property rights!”

Interviewer: What do you like best about driving in the V8s?

Driver: Well, I never really mastered using the turn signal, so it’s good to have that taken off the playing field.

Interviewer: Great stuff! Good luck, man!

Driver: I locked my keys in the car. My house keys. My car keys are locked in my house.

Basketball

“Yo! I learned how to play basket ball on the street! That meant whenever a car came along the street I had to step off the street. Onto the footpath, holmes!” – My street credentials

When I was a kid everyone wanted to play basketball because it was fun. And NBA Jam had taught us that if you dunked hard enough the backboard would explode.

"...aaaaaaand ‘SPLODE!"

Michael Jordan managed to be our hero simply by playing the sport he was insanely good at, without accidentally sexing any underage girls, strippers, prostitutes or underage stripper prostitutes. As far as I know.

Before you start to think I’m talking about golf, let’s get back on track: the streets, man. As I said, I was raised on the mean streets (of Mollywood, check the sign) and like every other black kid or really tall Chinese kid, the streets is where I learnt my insane b-ball skills. I think we can make basketball more relevant for the modern age and harken back to our savage ancestral Mayan-style sport by having the losing team get knifed in a drug deal gone bad. Easy fix.

What other sports really need to be modernised and get with the times? Drop me a comment and let me know. Can we fix it? Yes we can. Like a cross between Bob the Builder and Obama.

Top 10 Lengthy Meandering Outros

First of all, I know what you’re thinking: it’s about time. Thank God someone is willing to tackle the important issues.

Today I want to talk about a sneaky little trend that I see in the recording industry: the song with the Lengthy Meandering Outro (LMO)

First, some ‘technical’ ‘lingo’. An ‘outro’ is the opposite of the more common ‘intro’. In the way an intro ‘introduces’ a song or an album, an outro ‘outroduces’ the song or album. So, when you ‘intro’ the song, you don’t just jump in with the double kick insanity, you start with some cowbell and work your way up to it. (Note: This is only an example. I know of no band badass enough to try this). For the outro you reverse the process. Why close out a track with some double kick insanity when you can draw it out for three more minutes, add some harpsichord and a boy’s choir? Make it really memorable.

The longer the outro can meander along before petering out, the better. It should change keys, add some new instruments or melodic lines or even animal sounds. Anything goes, really. The outro is to a song what the cousin who just stopped taking their Ritalin is to your family reunion.

Sidenote: Some albums include an intro, outro or both as individual tracks, the idea being that these will ‘bookend’ the album. I call this lazy. It pushes up the number of tracks on the album, sure. On a 10 track album with an intro and an outro you get 8 songs that you can sing at full volume in your car on the way to work, and that is not okay. Usually, because they are lazy bands, they will even name these tracks 'intro' and 'outro' on their track listing. Do not support these bands.

To be eligible for my list of the top 10 songs with Lengthy Meandering Outros, the outro needed to be a) long and b) meandering (like one of my blog posts). Extra marks were given for outros that changed the tone or dynamic of the song or felt like they added to the ‘story’ of the song. Each band could only enter once; otherwise it would have just been a list of long Led Zeppelin songs. (I actually left out the Zep because I wanted to go for things less well known).

I will list the artist’s name, the song title, the length of the sing and finally use my patented OUTROstanding score rating system (TM) to give you an indication of how much you need that outro in your miserable life. They are in no particular order, unless you count whatever order I want as a system.

Jimmy Eat World - Goodbye Sky Harbour (16 minutes, 11 seconds)

This song goes for a massive 16 minutes! The first 4 minutes are bog-standard rock music, but then it’s like the guys in the band forgot that they were recording a song and decided they wanted to practice an 8-bar repeating pattern for 11 minutes. Have you ever seen one of those shows on TV where someone loops the security footage so the vault still looks empty while they’re clearing it out? In this song Jimmy Eat World do that with your brain. I’ll be humming that goddamn hook 17 days after I last heard the song. The outro is actually way too long, but I love the way the vocal melodies come in and overlap right in the last few minutes. This song kind of asks more questions than it answers. How do you float the idea of a 16 minute song to your bandmates? How many times do you practice it? It would take over an hour to run through it four times!

Okay guys, then you play that run 1200 more times, throw in some 'da da daa's at the end and we're done.

Rated 7/10 OUTROstandings

Guns ‘N’ Roses – November Rain (8 minutes, 57 seconds)

So apparently when humans get too hot, they sweat, yeah? But for Axl Rose, who had more hair than a yeti, and then usually slapped a bandana or a cap or both on top of that ginger rat’s nest, this thing called ‘sweating’ didn’t work right. It just got reabsorbed into his fibrous armour. Plus he was always running around like a pyromaniac at a petrol station. He must have been so tanked.

So when Axl got tired, he would just cede the stage to Slash for 3-4 minutes and get his breath back. Slash is part man and part jungle spirit. He’s what I imagine Jesus would be like if he had worn a top hat and rocked your fucking face off at Gethsemane Fest ‘-1. And ultimately, whether Slash closed the song out with some crazy lick or Axl finished off with a lyric like “Ai-yi-yi-ee-yi-yi. Yiiii,” didn’t matter. You were rocked, and that was the main thing.

Rated 8/10 OUTROstandings

(Honourable Mention: Every other 8 minute G’N’R song)

Weezer – Only In Dreams (8 minutes exactly. Gotta respect that)

This is the one that started it all for me. As a teen my best friend T and I would get our electric guitars and attempt to play along to the two overlapping outro solos on the CD. I never got past the first page on the sheet music. A bit of a liability, I was, I’m afraid. (T was always the superior guitarist to me, still is by the look of it. I believe his secret was something to do with taking lessons, followed up with some practicing.)

When I listen to this song, I dig both parts, the vocals and the outro solo. But the way those dual solos ratchet up the intensity and then the drums and the bass just crash through everything to bring it home – magic.

Rated OUTROstandings 10/10

(Honourable Mention: The Angel and the One)

Foo Fighters – A320 (5 minutes, 45 seconds)

This song – and I’m not kidding here – is off the Godzilla soundtrack. How this piece of magical deliciousness and an unreleased Ben Folds track ended up on the same soundtrack as P. Diddy covering Kashmir I do not know. I’m assuming the title refers to the model number on an aircraft. I have two supporting arguments for this theory:

1) I am a genius.

2) This outro literally makes me feel like I’m in an aeroplane that has hit turbulence. This song lifts you up, shakes you around and then brings you in to land. Beautiful. (Now you just have to try and find it!)

Rated 9/10 OUTROstandings

(Honourable Mention: Razor. Watch him play it to his baby on the Skin and Bones DVD. I want to be Dave Grohl’s baby. Other OUTROstanding tracks include Aurora and End Over End.)

Tonic – Let Me Go (5 minutes, 54 seconds)

Tonic are reuniting! New album! This year! Woohooooo!! Okay, got that out of the way. This song has a noticeable shift in dynamic as it moves from the main song to the outro, as well as a key change. While the first part is pleading and gentle (which I love) the outro is more aggressive and insistent (which I love). If you’re going to invest almost six minutes in listening to a song, you better like the whole damn thing. And I do. And you should too.

Rated 9/10 Outstandings

Semisonic – I Wish (7 minutes, 56 seconds)

Most outros up the ante in terms of tempo or dynamic, but Dan Wilson from Semisonic runs his own game. He doesn’t have to live by the man’s rules! Having made his case lyrically, he leaves it to the piano to bring us on home. Ahh.

Rated 7/10 OUTROstandings

Oasis – Champagne Supernova (7 minutes, 28 seconds)

As amazing as a 7-and-a-half minute song is, more amazing still is the assumption that the Gallagher brothers at one stage in their career were sober enough to perform this song in its entirety. Then again, it is equally plausible that this song would actually improve if the majority of the band were to perform it while intoxicated. Who really knows?

Rated 8/10 OUTROstandings

Hoobastank – More than a Memory (7 minutes, 16 seconds)

After The Reason, Hoobastank were left in a tricky position. They had released one crappy album no one cared about and one album that lit up the sales charts like Snoop Dogg lights up anything that isn’t nailed down. Ideally, they wanted to repeat the sales performance of The Reason, rather than their self-titled release. They did this by crafting a song that throws every instrument ever made at you, and seeing what sticks. I couldn't even guess at what's playing when by the end of this track. The assist list must look like a philharmonic orchestra, and it sounds like a mashup between a troupe of mariachis and the French Resistance. Still, nice LMO, guys.

Rated 6/10 OUTROstandings

Incubus – Aqueous Transmission (7 minutes, 48 seconds)

Not so much an outro as a slow fade to the sound of frogs chirping. Love the Japanese feel too, for obvious reasons.

Rated 5/10 OUTROstandings

Van Halen – Humans Being (5 minutes, 8 seconds)

It’s tricky to do a really powerful LMO on a Van Halen song, because Eddie is contractually obligated to do 13 solos within the body of any given song already. It becomes almost untenable. But in Humans Being, one of the tracks written for the movie Twister, Van Halen throw in a bit of an outro. Mostly to stop Sammy Hagar from having the last word, I reckon.

Rated 4/10 OUTROstandings

(Honourable Mention: Right Now. Mostly because it’s like Alex Van Halen forgets that they’re fading the song out at the end.)

In much the same way that Chad Kroeger incorporates lashings of sex and violence into his lyrics in order to sell albums, I have realised in the course of writing this article that there is a mathematical formula to this outro business. Really, anything less than a minute on the outro just isn’t trying hard enough. But if you run too far over about four minutes everyone knows you’re just running a scam on your record label, and probably want out of a contract or something. You really want a 1:1 or 1:1.5 ratio for your actual song/outro in order to be successful. Then again, all the maths and theory in the universe can’t explain the rise and fall and rise again of Britney Spears, so maybe that kind of stuff isn’t really that important.

Now it’s your turn. What songs do you know that have LMOs? Drop me a comment. I will definitely listen to them (bearing in mind that it has to rock somewhat, I don’t want to listen to Enya hum to trees for 9-and-a-half minutes) and may even give an OUTROstanding rating to your recommendations, if they are worthy.

Breaking News

I have exciting news. If we were to live in a world where it was even possible for my blog to be more awesome than it already is, that world would begin sometime in the months of July or August.

Why, I hear you plaintively cry? Because that, dear reader, is the time frame for my emigration to Japan! That's right, Japan, where awesomeness was invented along with Godzilla, Nintendo, giant Tanuki balls and swords so sharp they can cut through an idea.

As a man, I think I would rather plummet to my death than try to use my balls to break my fall. But that's why I'm not an awesome tanuki.

My wife and I both applied to the JET scholarship for the opportunity to be placed in Japan - where, we aren't sure just yet. I'll keep you posted on that though, count on it! - and given employment as assistant language teachers. Needless to say we were accepted. It's been in the works for a long time. (What I think is long and what a nation that didn't even really talk to other nations until the mid 1800s are two very different things.) It's also the culmination of a lot of planning and not a few sacrifices to get to a place where we could do this, so it's extremely gratifying that the selection committee recognised our passion and our ability. And our awesomeness.

So as I said, it is entirely possible that we are on the cusp of a new world of awesomeness beamed direct to you through the magical powers of the interweb. As always this will be tempered by my laziness, my body's way of telling me to do something more important. But here's where you can help! Your comments are like the twigs that keeps the sputtering flames of my soul from dying out completely. I'm already anticipating being quite out of my depth. But I also know that an experience like this will be hugely inspiring for my writing.

I may even learn how to use words other than awesome.

Everything I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Doctor Impossible

I just finished a book that I wish I had written myself: Soon I will be Invincible, by Austin Grossman.

I love it when you find a book by chance that really provides a great read. For me, I know a book's good when it makes me want to re-assess what I'm doing in my writing, where I'm going right now. O reven if it makes me want to do some writing, like now!

Now this book is by no means for everyone, being something of a ‘niche read’. But for comics fans it’s really the ultimate. It seems to me like the book Alan Moore would have written had he not decided to do Watchmen in the comics medium, a fascinating deconstruction of the specific rules and mythology that we have culturally established in the superhero genre.
That thing about not judging a book by its cover is bullshit.
I was at the Chartwell library trawling for some words to entertain and inspire me. I made my way to the end of the adult section, the dusty corner where they keep the large print books. One of the librarians has the unenviable task of ’merchandising’ a particular genre of books on a table in this portion of the library. The amount of notice I took of this display table is evident in the fact that I cannot remember a single display prior to the one I saw on this fateful day.
This day/week/month(?)’s display was representing the fantasy section. On the wall behind the table were swords and shields from the $2 dollar shop. Enticing. The covers of the books themselves did a pretty good job of representing your typical fantasy scenario. There were elves; dragons; maidens; wizards and of course buff dudes with long hair, loin cloths and helmets. I, like most people I know, look at these books with a kind of derision. I don’t really think about them as real stories. I freely admit that I have never really given them a chance. Maybe they’re amazing. Every once in a while I get a recommendation for Anne McCaffrey or David Gemmel, but I haven’t really explored it. I read Lord of the Rings when I was twelve. It was boring, and took me about a year. My favourite bit was the guy who could turn into a bear (which is basically a superpower, isn’t it).
But I digress. Stashed in amongst the barbarians, dwarves and night elves (or forest elves, I find it hard to distinguish between the two) was one book that looked different. It looked like... holy shit, it looked like its cover had been drawn by Bryan Hitch, British illustrator well known for his massive ensemble comic covers!

Bryan Hitch must have the sweetest nightmares known to man. This image makes up the front cover, the back cover and the inner panels.

If you're going to write a book about superheroes, you're going to want a comics artist to draw your cover. Don't just show a mask stretched between two gloved fists. That is lame. And if you want on that super awesome cover a tiger wearing pants like a man, a transparent lady with glass nipples and a big goatee'd helmet, then you better pick up the phone and call Bryan Hitch because odds are even he draws that sort of shit every day for a warm up, while he's eating, on a napkin, and it still looks amazing.
I know what you’re thinking, and yes I am a big enough comics geek to spot and recognise a specific artist’s work at twenty paces. I’m the guy who watched early episodes of Heroes going, “clearly that is the work of Tim Sale, not Isaac Mendez.” I probably even scoffed.
Heroes is an apt comparison to Mr Grossman’s work, actually. Both share that same reverence for superhero culture and a desire to explore the real life drama that would naturally occur as a result of having abilities beyond the norm. But while Heroes takes its subject matter very seriously, Grossman walks a finer line, somewhere between that reverence and an acceptance of the ridiculousness of the superhero genre.

Lucky the dinosaur isn't holding a sword too. That'd be ridiculous.

Doctor Impossible, the book’s primary villain, states “You can be the smartest man in the world, but if you try something like [taking over the world], a Special Forces reject is still going to rappel over the wall and punch you in the stomach”.
Doctor Impossible is definitely the star of the show. His narrative comprises one half of the story, alternating chapter by chapter with Fatale, the uncertain new recruit of the recently re-formed Champions super team. He spends much of the story alone, lamenting to the reader about his inability to take over the world, and blaming many of his problems on MHD (Malign Hypercognition Disorder, or ‘Evil Genius Syndrome’, a hilarious riff on our tendency to label any type of behaviour as the responsibility of some sort of disorder.)
The final point in my case for why this book is completely awesome, your honour, is the supplemental material at the back of the volume. There’s an appendix of every superhero or villain named in the novel, complete with sometimes derivative, sometimes hilarious (and sometimes both) origin stories. Best of all, there are mock covers, fully inked and coloured for the comics series that this story could so easily have been, featuring main characters from the story in typical comic poses.
If you like comics at all, you should read this book. On a scale of ten, I give it 38 heat visions and a shrink ray.

And you should have a good Easter.

*Cough. What were you thinking!* (This is the American cover. Suckers.) All I'm saying is, if you put this cover, designed by someone who earned their design degree from the National School of Block Primary Colours Design, in a locked room with Bryan Hitch's cover, I think we both know which one would emerge with a distended stomach.