Monday's Inanity = Wildfires, Cowboys, Super Bowl, Macon, GA

Happy Monday! It's cold and rainy here in Georgia today, so I hope the rest of you are experiencing better weather. To my California homies: the local news says you can see the smoke from an Orange County wildfire from where you are in Los Angeles -- is that true? Ah, wildfires. I remember the time, back when Peggy and I lived in Glendale, a brush-fire climbed over the top of the ridgeline and down into our part of the San Fernando Valley. It was nighttime and Peter, Josh, Matt, David were over and we were standing out on my apartment balcony. We could see a wide cut of fire blazing in the darkness, hemmed in by the flashing red lights of fire trucks. At times the fire only smoldered darkly, so low you could almost make out the scrub bushes silhouetted black against the deep red, but then, for no apparent reason, the fire would flare up and become a big yellow scar reaching from one side of the mountain to the other. Struck by the dramatic visuals, I said aloud to myself, to everyone, more than once, and because I was literally helpless not to, "The fires of Mordor," trying hard to put that special Gandalf-ian rolling on the first 'r' in Mordor. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog regularly that I am a mega-dork. Ah, memories.

Anyway. Peggy and I went to a club/bar called Cowboys on Saturday night. One of Peggy's business-school friends was having a birthday get-together of sorts there, so we drove out to rural-leaning Kennesaw and joined in. If you're wanting to drink, holler, line-dance, and find someone slightly drunker than you to go home with, this is the place for you. Late in their set, after we'd been there for a few hours, the house band announced to a rapt and inebriated audience, "If any of ya'll ain't drinkin', you're in the wrong place." I could only nod. Cowboys is kind of a big deal in Georgia. One of the few country stars I've actually heard of, Dwight Yoakam (AKA Raoul), is going to be there on the 24th of next month. I'd consider going if I thought I'd have any reasonable expectation of having my copy of Panic Room signed, but I kinda doubt he'd do it. I bet he's going to come all this way just to play music. Oh well.

And on Sunday was the Super Bowl. The game itself was a massive snore though it had in it the potential to be good. But every time there was an opportunity for it to get interesting, in marched the refs to blow a call that didn't need calling in the first place. I'm not sure the Seahawks were robbed exactly, but the viewers were for damn sure robbed of a good game thanks to those boneheads. More importantly, the commercials were pretty lame. The one bright spot, I thought, was a commercial I haven't yet heard mentioned in the roundups of the best commercials from last night. It was a Nextel spot, and, for my money, featured some of the funniest phone-to-face action I've ever seen. I like violence. I also kind of laughed at the Caveman FedEx commercial. I really liked the way the Jon Heder-like "employee" caveman gestured to his "boss" caveman as he grunted, "But FedEx doesn't exist!" He seemed both desperately frustrated and hopelessly stupid all at once -- brilliance.

And finally, I wanted to include this. I spent a bit of my childhood growing up in 3 different houses in Macon, so I'm glad to see an institution as august and influential as The Onion sit up, take notice, and make fun of it. John Rocker, Janet Reno, and Patrick Crane, all born in Macon.