This Saturday I was able to relax and read through Rolling Stone editor David Wild’s 2008 book He Is…I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond.

Let me make this clear off the bat – this book doesn’t come close to approaching the quality of the books I usually review on this site. It’s essentially a long essay by one of the industry’s most respected music critics about his long, secret love affair with the music of Neil Diamond. It’s part biography of Diamond (albeit a lazy one, recycling old quotes from just a handful of sources) and part apologetics. My credentials as a Neil Diamond fan are well-established. I don’t feel like I have to apologize about that anymore, especially since his remarkable post-2005 career renaissance.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from this short book:

-Wild’s essential argument: Diamond has written an incredible number of moody, melodic masterpieces, and done so completely on his own terms. Who else’s career mirrors his? Even in the his schmaltzy AOR era of the late 70s and 80s, Wild argues that Diamond essentially created that market, and artists like Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie, and Kenny Rogers followed. He contends (and I would agree) that the fact that he has never even been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is evidence of an elitist bias against Diamond’s unparalleled popular success.

-I saw Neil Diamond in concert in 1996 with my best friend from high school. We had front row seats, and we went so ballistic during “Shilo”, our favorite song, that he pointed at us and nodded. I’m not kidding about any of this. That might be one of my top 10 favorite experiences ever, along with getting married, growing a beard, and the Vikings’ dramatic last-second win on Sunday.

-Neil Diamond puts his form-fitting, glass-beaded pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.

-Long before Wesley Snipes became America’s sweetheart, Neil Diamond regularly concluded his concerts by saying, “Thank you! Goodnight! Always bet on black!”

-Diamond’s childhood and adolescence struck me for how normal it was. After having read the eyebrow raising accounts of the childhood experiences of other entertainers like Groucho Marx, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bono, it was somewhat anticlimactic to read about Neil Diamond growing up in a loving, middle class Jewish family in Brooklyn. I kept waiting for one of his parents to get nailed by a bus.

-Neil Diamond devised his hip-wiggling, eye-bulging stage moves after watching a dog suffer an epileptic seizure.

-Though I’d hardly characterize this book as revelatory, Diamond came across in this book as a grounded, agreeable guy with an intense devotion to his work. That intensity has driven him to regularly isolate himself while chasing down his musical goals, resulting in a few broken marriages (to his credit, Wild doesn’t attempt to whitewash this). At the same time, his loyalty is on display when one takes a look at his troupe of backing musicians and collaborators, nearly all of whom have been working with him for 30+ years.

-In addition to his prolific run of hits from 1968-1972 that included “Sweet Caroline”, “Cracklin’ Rosie”, “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” and “Play Me”, Neil Diamond also served as Richard Nixon’s embattled press secretary.

-Wild makes an argument that “America” is a genuinely great, heartfelt song celebrating the immigration experience of Diamond’s grandparents and so many others. However, patriotic American that I genuinely am, I still can’t really stomach the song. It’s just so blasted ham-fisted. (TODAY!)

-Neil Diamond is old enough to be my grandfather, yet still spry enough to elude me in a footrace down a private Malibu beach path.

During pauses from becoming completely mentally and financially prepared for fatherhood, I’ve had the pleasure of breezing through Joseph Ellis’s His Excellency, a fine, modestly-sized biography of America’s great unknowable founder, George Washington.

Ellis has written a wonderful book that provides a large amount of insight into the motives and mindset of George Washington, a man whose austerity, dignity, and aloofness created an aura of authority and mystery around that has not dissipated with time. Rather than coming closer to knowing him over the subsequent years, Washington has remained as lifeless as an ivy-covered statue in our popular understanding. His Excellency is a great, eminently readable study of the personality and greatness of this remarkable man.

Here are a few highlights from the text:

-Ellis contends that Washington’s studied silence masked the fact that he wrestled with his own turbulent passions. Again and again, he to peels back layers of correspondence and to see Washington as a man determined to rise above his mammoth ambitions and ego to project a serene authority. The self-control and character he built in this fashion allowed him to serve and lead this fledgling nation out of its infancy in a way that probably no other man would have been able. Examples of his vigilant self-surrender serving as a benefit to a larger cause include his choosing to adopt a defensive posture midway through the Revolutionary War (against his own highly aggressive instincts), voluntarily surrendering all military and political authority at the conclusion of the war (for this reason, Americans should thank God that Washington was different than Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Mao or any other man from history placed in a similar position), and his refusal to accept a third term as president (though he would certainly have won).

-Famously, Washington had wooden teeth. Less known is the fact that he also had wooden eyes.

-George Washington is alive and living in Boca Raton, Florida according to the drunken homeless man who wandered into traffic in front of my car last night.

-Out of Washington’s internal battles arose a tough-minded political realism. He understood innately that people and nations act not out of ideals but out of interest. He was never prone to sentimentalism or clouded by utopian visions like many of his contemporaries (Jefferson, most notably). For these reasons, he harbored no illusions about the reliability of volunteer militia regiments, he welcomed France’s involvement in the Revolutionary War only warily, he was an immediate skeptic of the weak central government of the Articles of Confederation, and he scoffed at the high-minded platitudes of the French Revolution. Washington’s understanding of the evil in himself attuned him to the evil in the world. As Ellis writes, his internal struggles “inoculated him against the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot’s phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

-During cabinet meetings, George Washington would delight the rotund John Adams by tickling him. Sometimes Alexander Hamilton liked to join in, but he would often get too rough and the three men would have to be separated.

-Washington was not a particularly religious man. He attended church on occasion but did not take communion, and letters from him do not seem to reflect any reservoir of feeling or thought on the matter. If there was an overarching ethic to his life and attitudes, it wasn’t the Protestantism of his upbringing, but the older model of Roman stoicism – accepting of his Providential fate over and above his own desires.

-Late one night in a candlelit Philadelphia tavern, George Washington and Ben Franklin went to third base with each other. Of course, in 1700s terms, “third base” means “writing a respectful but affectionate note of correspondence.”

-On his death bed, Washington requested, “Someday, place my visage on a quarter-dollar coin, but make sure it looks like I’m not wearing a shirt.”

-One of the most fascinating themes in the book involves tracing the evolution of Washington’s thoughts on slavery (he owned over 300 slaves). Up until the Revolution, he appears to have never given the matter a second thought. During the war, the experience of commanding free black men under the banner of individual liberty awoke him from his numbness. Upon his return, he also became acutely aware of the economic problems and contradictions of slavery. He didn’t like the existence of slavery, or the fact that his hands were bloody in the mess, but true to form, he refused to allow it to become an issue of idealism or sentimentalism. He wrote to a friend of his intentions to “liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings” – yet he hesitated until he could do so in a way that made economic and pragmatic sense. That occasion did not arise until his death. His will specified that all slaves in his possession be freed, and that an education and financial support be provided to them. While we might wish for Washington to have made a more unambiguous moral statement about the question of slavery, such behavior would have been out of character for him.

-Washington was just over 6’3”, well above average for a man of his day. In fact, as a young man he briefly played power forward for the Williamsburg Continentals as a rebounding defensive specialist. He was an 18th century Mark Madsen.

If George Washington were alive today, the first thing he would say would be “let me fly a helicopter.”

Time to order school pictures!

Let’s take a look at a few of my options this year, now that my school has decided to snazz things up with the help of a new company.

Wow, look at that. I look like a smart-ass Japanese pop star. I love it.

This is a fun one. You can see my physical discomfort in the image on the left as the photographer kept asking me to slouch because I was too tall for her equipment to handle. The resulting picture shows me standing in a way that I never have before and never will again. The version of me on the right is smirking at how stupid the version of me on the left looks.

This one’s classy. It makes me look like I tragically died midway through the year.

Which one should I choose?

Your favorite television shows are back with new episodes!

You like that show with the crazy boss? Tune in to see his latest hijinks! You like the show with the crazy boss who is stupid too? Tune in at a slightly earlier time and see what happens!

You like shows where people dance? You have no fewer than nine reality variants for your viewing pleasure! All of them feature scantily-clad women and judges with orange skin! What a feeling!

Do you like shows that feature bloody corpses, grizzled banter, and initials? Tune in at 9pm CST on every channel and you’ll have dismembered human appendages coming out your ass! Be prepared to learn more about perverse sexual deviancy than you could ever hope to forget!

Do you like shows that feature banal witticisms, unclever double entendres, and the Emmy-winning antics of Mr. Jon Cryer? Then watch Two and a Half Men and kill yourself.

Do you like pompous blowhards speaking in elevated tones and interrupting each other? FOX News and MSNBC are on the air!

Do you like sitcoms that star Jenna Elfman for some reason? Then watch Accidentally on Purpose, but hurry, because it’s going fast!

Do you like footage of Billy Crystal slowly, awkwardly removing his clothes? Then turn on your computers, turn off your content filters, and hop on the internet – it’s out there somewhere!

Television – it’s like radio, but with cleavage!

Have you guys ever had chicken before?

I just had some chicken. It’s good! It’s not salty like pork or dry like cat food.

The chicken I had was special. It was processed and wadded and glazed with honey barbeque sauce and various artificial preservatives. Each meaty chickenwad was tender and benign, like former president Gerald Ford.

I recommend these honey barbeque processed chickenwads to all of you. They tickled my taste buds, groped my uvula, and made unwelcomed sexual remarks to my small intestine. That’s chicken for you, though. Chicken shoots first and gets dipped in honey mustard later.

I think someone should make a new breakfast cereal with big old chunks of chicken in it. I’m no marketing genius, but it seems to me you get some crispy flakes, toss in some chicken hunks, and slap a picture of a cartoon Spaniard on the box and you’ve got yourself a million dollar idea. You can thank me later.

Chicken – it’s not just for people from Central America anymore!

Gather near, slobbering troll-beasts, and writhe in the presence of the new Rock TV!

This is another of our ham-fisted “message videos”, similar in approach to the old “Jaded Dating Tips” video we did back in 2005. While perhaps a bit more hard-hitting than other message videos we’ve done, it is also admittedly a hodgepodge of ideas. Some of the gags reflect Adam O’s paradigm of the Bible Ass-Man who uses scripture to challenge people’s pain and politics without any sense of empathy. Other gags (not-so-subtlety) go after the “feel good all the time” school of Christianity that tends to breed rampant church-hopping and consumerist mentalities.

Also, it features jokes.

By far, my favorite part of this video is the dream sequence about 4 minutes into the video. It’s a wonderfully surreal aside that interrupts the established pacing of the video for no reason other than to be strange. Other favorite bits are Leroy’s obnoxious prayer ambiance and his sadness at erasing his sin-free record. Overall, while probably not one of our top 10 efforts, I feel like this video is solidly consistent, with enough good lines and tossed-off gags to keep a smile going throughout.

Enjoy, and stay tuned for the next new Rock TV, coming this Halloween!