Admittedly, mine is not a spectacular vehicle. It cannot accelerate or slow itself with any haste; it is neither shiny nor safe. Inside, it is formless and beige, like a foreclosed condominium. The display on the radio doesn’t work anymore and the A/C has become only minimally responsive. At this point, the car is probably better suited for transporting condemned prisoners to the place of their execution than getting me to work. The fact that I, a handsome, occasionally friendly man with full-time job and a full-grown beard am forced to drive it is yet another grave injustice of our capitalist system.

The most recent and serious breakdown of my Hyundai involved the lock on the driver’s side door, which became jammed shut. Thus, the cockpit seat was accessable only by getting in the passenger-side door and lumbering awkwardly over to the driver’s side. This feat was made more difficult by the fact that I am a 6’5″ man and the Sonata is a vehicle designed by the best and brightest modestly-sized engineers of Korea.

After several failed attempts to make the passage, I eventually figured out that a feet-first attempt was my only real shot at making it to the driver’s seat. So up and over I went: first swinging my feet and legs over to the driver’s side, then raising my hips and sending them clumsily over the raised arm rest with a strained grunt and stifled profanity. The final step was to wildly lurch my upper body from one side of the cabin to the other without dragging my head along the roof or wrenching my back. It was not one of the more refined, sophisticated moments of my life.

I ended up having to drive the car in this state for two days before it could get fixed. At one point, after running a quick errand I returned to my parking spot to see that my broken Hyundai was now closely surrounded on both sides with other cars whose drivers were sitting right there in their respective driver’s seats for some reason or another. Swallowing hard, I avoided eye contact and tried to move from the passenger door to my driver’s seat as confidently and smoothly as possible. Later, while veering wildly out of the parking lot, I realized that in my embarassed rush I’d managed to somehow rip the sole from one of my shoes halfway off while positioning myself.

In summary, my Hyundai humiliates me and destroys my shoes. If there were any justice in this world, I would be allowed to send it over Niagra Falls without the EPA getting in my business.

For those unfamiliar with the details of my life for some reason, my wife and I are the ambivalent owners of two half-witted cats, Mona and Ben Franklin. The two of them torment us with their incessant early morning yowling and unnatural perversion. Once upon a time, we delighted in their imbecilic antics and found comfort in their ample girth, but now that we have actual human children to raise and tend to, the luster is gone.

Let me put it to you this way: while I wouldn’t want to smother them each to death with a large bath towel per se, I also wouldn’t spend much time mourning them if they were both killed by a rattlesnake or something.

Last night was the last straw. My time spent cleaning up and taking out their noxious leavings could have been spent doing more productive, affirming things reading a book or embracing my wife or sewing pleats into my jeans. What good is it to have cats if we have to put so much work into their care and they just lay around creating uncomfortable situations?

To clarify, I’m not saying that I’m actually going to do anything to my cats. I’m just saying that they are each uniquely terrible and it would be better if they had never lived, that’s all.

Their poop stinks so bad, you guys.

The book is a study of America’s headlong rush into the 1898 Spanish-American War, viewed through the conflicting perspectives of famously powerful Boston and New York elites and intellectuals like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, & William Randolph Hearst. Along the way, Thomas examines man’s fascination with war itself – how human nature is drawn to it, occasionally revels in it, and fears it. Somewhat less effectively, Thomas also frames the book to underline the similarities between the war fever of 1898 with America’s rush into the Iraq War a decade ago, going so far as to imagine Dick Cheney being the inheritor of T.R.’s famous war lust.

I enjoyed the book, with some qualifications. As a look into the elite Brahmin aristocracy of the Gilded Age, it’s terrific. I liked the character studies of crusted intellectuals like William James (whose pluralism-friendly philosophy of pragmatism has become quite influential, and which I teach in my philosophy class) and the audacious, unscrupulous journalist William Randolph Hearst. The chapters on the war itself were fresh and lean, capturing that strange mix of bloody adrenaline, and confused, dreary boredom.

Having studied Roosevelt a fair degree already, I appreciated Thomas’ treatment of him less. Roosevelt left behind a mountain of written material and speeches, and Thomas seems to have scrounged around for every half-cocked comment about military glory he could find in order to paint him as a man who was close to being dangerously unhinged (and a burden to his family) when it seems to me the record shows him to be nothing of the sort. Similarly, Thomas awkwardly and unnecessarily drops in racially insensitive quotes from T.R.’s letters every now and again, as if to signal his unsympathetic nature to the modern reader lacking context otherwise.

As I’ve written about, Roosevelt is best understood as a moderate who lived in strained times. He was an intellectual savant who could talk himself in circles with “on the one hand this, but on the other hand that”, but usually chose a course of action that was both practical and bold. To insinuate that he was a bigot or racist by the standards of his era is unfair, particularly in the racially hypersensitive times we live in today. It seems to me that Thomas’ thesis on war itself (that it is a dark but inescapable function of human nature) soured him on Roosevelt, who idealized martial virtues. Thomas later offers up a fair, if half-hearted postscript, noting that, as president, T.R. kept the U.S. out of war and that his presidential rhetoric was “not particularly bellicose”.

—

Here are a few stray tidbits from the book that I appreciated:

-My favorite line in the book, and a phrase I intend on making use of myself, was found on p. 357. Roosevelt had returned from war, and was asked how he was doing. He shouted back, “I am feeling disgracefully well!”

-Of all the men studied in the book, Thomas’ sympathies seem to lie most with William James. This is well founded. James was an insightful intellectual with cosmopolitan attitudes and a realistic understanding of human nature and society. The antics of the “war lovers” Roosevelt, Hearst, and Lodge dismayed him, but he was also unimpressed with the so-called “mugwumps” – high society progressives and reformers who sniffed at politics and everyday Americans. This group would seem to have been a natural community for James, but their smug antipatriotism struck him as self-defeating, and their stuffiness left him bored.

-Apparently everybody in 1898 wore black for some reason.

-William Randolph Hearst comes across as a strange guy. For all the crazed headlines and yellow journalism he was responsible for, and for all the publicity stunts he pulled (including sailing to Cuba to insert himself heedlessly into the war), he was an odd, awkward dude. Painfully shy, alternately manic and morose, with a limp-wristed handshake and an affection for chorus girls, he loved influence and melodrama but was pained when attention was placed on him. He filled his newspapers with bloated partial truths and filled his letters to his mother with self-pity. He was like Glenn Beck’s effeminate 1890s doppelganger.

-Soldiers serving in Cuba referred to malaria and yellow fever as “the black vomit”, which is beautifully and disturbingly evocative.

-The 1890s was a golden age for facial hair, when beards were pointy and mustaches robust. Not until the 1970s ascendancy of Dan Haggerty would America’s beards see such warmth and richness again.

-Famously, the 39-year old Roosevelt resigned his powerful post as assistant secretary of the navy (he was the de facto head of the navy much of the time because of the secretary’s long absences) to raise a cavalry regiment of cowboys and Harvard men to personally fight in the war. Of course, this was an insane thing to do, and literally everybody seems to have told Roosevelt this. Undeterred, he wrote long letters to friends and advisors explaining his motivations as being honorable and disinterested. While T.R. was no doubt acting on some of his deepest convictions, Thomas suggests that Roosevelt was also acting to erase the one blemish on his much-loved father’s record: the fact that he had avoided fighting in the Civil War. This was Roosevelt’s chance to avenge the family name, and he did so with gusto – the move would literally launch him into the presidency a few years later.

-Roosevelt loved the vigorous life and fighting. In a letter to Lodge after the fighting was over, he breathlessly began one paragraph, “Did I tell you that I killed a Spaniard with my own hand?” Experts agree that, had T.R. been alive in 1987, he would have fought and defeated Hulk Hogan in Wrestlemania III.

-In 2001, Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor for his service in the Spanish-American War. The next night, the ghost of Roosevelt appeared to Clinton and commanded him to annex the Philippines and pardon Mark Rich.

Picture, if you will, the heady days of the Carter administration. The sweetly unnatural strains of the Bee Gees were blasting from every radio and the dark majesty of Burt Reynolds’ chest hair spilled across America’s movie screens like a wheat field of virility. From this milieu, I burst forth onto planet earth, fully formed and wonderful. An obedient, long-napping blessing to my parents and an eventual benefit to culture and higher thought across planet earth, I was a uniquely special and humble person from the beginning.

Here is a picture of me when I was about a year old. Look carefully, and you will see my adult soul peering out through those blank, unfocused eyes. My thinning baby hair and corpulent double chin belied the cunning and calculation that would later serve me so well in my middle school years.

Let us now address the issue of my false nose in the above photograph. From the start, I used humor as a device to procure the love and acceptance of others. In this instance, the juxtaposition of my childhood innocence with the oversized nose of a man garnered rousing laughter and lifelong memories from my family. In a way, I have chased this image across the years of my life. Every joke I’ve cracked since then, every blog entry I’ve written, and every detention I’ve assigned have, in some sense, been an attempt to recapture this lost moment from my childhood, now gone forever.

Flash forward ten years. Here I sit with my siblings. From left to right, my sister Julia, my brother Brian, myself, and my other brother (whose name escapes me at the moment). Clearly, my life had grown more crowded with the growth of my family. Despite my loud, prolonged protestations, I was no longer the center of my parents’ (and the world’s?) attention.

Once again, my adult characteristics are on full display in this photo. The impatient, withering stare. The sophisticated attire. The disengagement with those closest to me. No doubt my wife will nod and sigh wearily in agreement when she finally reads this blog post after my repeated prompting. Then she’ll return to reminding me not to eat five bowls of cereal in one day.

So there you have it. Me, encapsulated in two photographs and some 400 words. Consider this my obituary, except it is ironic and flagrantly inaccurate.

Still though, this is how I choose to be remembered.

*Cue “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan*

Here’s the situation: 25 teenagers, flush with academic success and the finality of high school, pockets engorged with cash, with only me and another chaperone to hold them back in the craziest city in the U.S.A. To paraphrase President James Buchanon in 1860, “Everything should work out just fine.”

It was a genuine honor that the seniors requested me as their chaperone. I’ve had this group on and off in my classes since they were 7th graders (it’s a small private school), and they’re genuinely a good bunch. I’m going to go ahead and assume that they wanted me with them because they like and respect me, and not because they think I’m a pushover who’ll look the other way if they duck curfew. I plan to preempt such notions by lecturing them about how Manhattan after midnight is patrolled by gangs of knife-wielding circus clowns high from huffing paint thinner and looking for midwestern naïfs to disembowel. I will support my case with a viewing of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, a film long hailed for being exactly accurate.

I’m not exactly certain what the administration is looking for out of their chaperones. If they’re looking for a tall, bearded man who can clearly enunciate rules and who wants to visit the Statue of Liberty, then they’re in luck. If they’re looking for somebody who can recommend good restaurants and avoid getting lost in the subway system, then there might be a problem. Let’s face it – under my supervision, these kids are pretty likely to end up stranded at a vacant Coney Island gas station right about the time our departing flight is taking off. If that happens, I might have to go to plan B: throw my cell phone and social security card in the trash and begin a new life as a drifter riding the rails with only a melody and my Master’s degree to keep me company.

Also, does anybody know if Manhattan has a Arby’s?

Life with two kids has definitely been an adjustment. Most moments around the house are spent comforting a crying child or having my crotch pulverized with a plastic baseball bat (by my wife, for doing this to us). There’s noticably less peace and quiet and considerably more time spent vacantly staring in the distance amidst the chaos. My wife Bridgette represents the eye of the Welle household hurricane, while the rest of us relentlessly whip around her – Alice crying, Oliver getting into mischief, and me offering unhelpful, unsolicited jokes. She is a beautiful, smart woman and an assured mother. She does a great job of putting up with my behaviors and redirecting me to clean the toilet again.

One of my favorite things about Alice joining our family has been watching Oliver enjoy being a big brother. Whether he’s poking his finger deep into her mouth or dropping to dead weight and laying on top of her, he is truly infatuated. Often as he is positioning my daughter’s feet behind her head, he turns to me and explains, “Helpful!” In those moments, I thank him for his servant’s heart and gently return her to a customary human position.

Things have changed quite a bit for me the past couple years. I eat alone at Wendy’s a lot less often these days, and I only rarely get to watch Minnesota’s fine sports teams on TV. The fact that those activities were about as good as it used to get for me demonstrates how far I’ve come. I’ll gladly trade those for my new family, even if it means that I get less sleep at night and must carefully apply various creams to my children’s anuses.

These are the tradeoffs, ladies and gentlemen. My life has been enriched with a rewarding job, a sweet companion for a wife and two uniquely cool little kids, but I must pay for this in free time. Like the typical American consumer, I am leveraged to the hilt. I have zero leisure liquidity. (Don’t ask where I’m getting the time to write this, smart guy, because I’m writing it while I’m going to the bathroom. So there.) I’m crammed full of life’s enrichment, like a washtub brimming with applesauce.

There was a simpler time in my life when I was able to repose and read history books, accompanied only by the crackling roar of a cozy fire and my silken nightgarments. I was served spiced refreshments by Quigley, my faithful manservant, who always knew the perfect moments to whisper my name and lift my pipe to my lips for another soft, invigorating puff. Specifically, those times I speak of were the 1890s, during America’s Gilded Age, a time I visit nightly in my dreams. (Incidentally, these dreams usually end in me being slain in a labor riot by socialist insurrectionists.)

Dreamt luxuries and idleness aside, my life is actually quite lovely these days. Yes, I don’t have the same time for reading or blogging or hating my cats, but it’s frankly much cooler to have a loving wife and two little kids who need me to be a good dad.

On an unrelated note, does anybody know how to rescue a 2 year old stuck in a drying machine?

Equally as terrible, several people at our home recently became ill.

Late Friday night, my long and illustrious streak of vomit-free living came to an ignoble end. Swimming with flu-induced nausea, I stumbled into the bathroom, collapsed to the floor, clipping my head on the toilet, and blacked out. When I came to, I had thrown up and my jaw ached like it had just collided with the hairy knuckles of the aforementioned swarthy Serbian assassin. Pleasantness followed for the next 12 hours, as the rest of the household cowed in fear of the sickness.

Complicating matters was the fact that Bridgette’s sister and two young children were staying with us for what was scheduled to be a weekend of unrestrained, screaming frivolity. However, my illness cast such pall over the festivities that the best they could manage was a silent, sullen visit to a nearby McDonalds playland, itself likely infested with the flu and pools of syphilis.

Predictably, my sister-in-law and niece were each struck asunder by the flu last night. The circle of barf was complete, and our house sank into a sinkhole of stinking squalor. Now, all are miserable, and the only thing left is to wait for the dreaded flu to strike our kids. For the moment, they remain as unwitting about their fate as was the Austro-Hungarian archduke on that June morning in 1914. Hopefully, when our kids become sick, other neighborhood children will not be pulled in with them because of the entanglements of a misguided alliance system.

Ultimately, there really isn’t anything more to say. Our household is currently passing through the shadows of life, and we have been made miserable.

This is all Germany’s fault.

Novice educators often make the mistake of thinking that the process is simple and put together some alphabetical monstrosity that torpedoes any chance at learning. A good teacher building a seating chart is like an iditarod racer selecting a hearty team of dogs for their grueling cross-country journey. They must make choices that maximize their team’s strengths, minimize their weaknesses, and forestall violent, cannibalistic insurrection.

Look at this classroom’s seating chart, for instance.

This is the mark of a master teacher – a work of rigid, fearsome, symmetrical beauty. It is impossible to tell whether these children are waiting to receive mathematics instruction or to witness a public execution. The classroom environment is spartan, the pedagogy is severe, and the technology is nonexistant. In other words, educational paradise.

In constructing their seating chart, a good teacher must first know their students. Who are the alpha males? Who’s the queen bee? Who smells like old popcorn all the time? Once assessed, the mixing and matching begins. In a way, it’s like being secretary general of the United Nations. Do you think Israel and Iran are seated next to each other? Do you suppose the Serbs and Croats are allowed to mingle freely? Hardly. A good teacher places obnoxious delinquents like Sudan in the front corner to minimize their distration while chatty butterflies like Italy are seated next to quiet, serious South Korea. Canada is a teacher’s dream – they’re responsible, pleasant, and can help defuse trenchcoat-wearing weirdos like Russia.

Properly placed, the classroom becomes a harmonious, symbiotic whole. Mishandled, the classroom becomes a flaming heap of overturned desks and desecrated bulletin boards. This is the difference between being a highly qualified educator and being a Taco Bell shift manager or combing the bears at the zoo or something else dumb.

Educators of America, you’re welcome.

Whether you are reading this website out of morbid curiosity, misguided hostility, or untreated depression, all are welcome inside the concrete digital walls of the JLP! We’re all the same here, except some people’s hands are clammier than others, and a few geniuses insist on breathing through their mouths. Because of our universal humanity and love of being tickled, we choose to affirm one another with our words and sensuous abdominal massages.

Now that we have formed a perfectly shaped semicircle, I invite each of you to stand before us by turns and express our deepest, most inexpressible shame. Then, by your tears and our voyeurism, we shall become one. Though deeply painful and plainly unnecessary, this process is both healing and compulsory.

The world is a painful place, dear readers. Financial hardships and knife-wielding north Minneapolitans have a funny way of upending your plans and stabbing your dog right when you least expect it. That’s why your JLP friends are here. We want to help you through it by listening to you and maybe asking you to consider taking your shirt off. We are a nurturing community of rejected misfits and greasy internet weirdos. We reject traditional societal norms and ignore common social cues. Instead, we nod nurturingly and impose sweaty, restorative hugs.

Come, reluctant readers. Join our therapeutic semicircle of wellness. But remember, everything is a secret!

The Feast of St. Valentine is upon us!

Today we celebrate the glory of St. Valentine, who offered himself to be devoured alive by wild beasts for the pleasure of the drunken Roman circuses in AD 269. We do this by displaying fanciful pink balloons.

I say this is no way to honor a fallen third century priest. Let us instead mount the severed head of a wild warthog on a pike! Let the black warthog blood drape us in its putrid essence! Children will flee in terror from our celebration, young lovers will vomit in disgust, and all will be made right.

You there! You shall be the one who procures a warthog for our services! Off with you now, into the dark woods. After a short time, you shall find a family of the filthy snout-beasts rutting in their own feces. Set upon them at once, hacking them limb from limb as their unholy squeals fill the sky with a cacophony of animalistic horror. Setting your broken and bloodied hacksaw aside, return the perferred portions of the warthogs to us with great haste. We must begin our writhing, debauched ceremony before nightfall.

For our part, we will remain here and set out the paper plates.

Do you hear us, St. Valentine? It won’t be long now!

The book is a crisp, concise examination of the the successes, failures, and character of Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, exploring their remarkable friendship against the larger backdrop of the Civil War. Flood does a wonderful job at describing the military progress and maneuverings of the war along with the tangled political web that made up the Union Army brass. (I’d strongly recommend the book to any Civil War novice seeking to understand the major battles and prominent military figures.) While it’s always a pleasure to read about men like Lincoln, Lee, McClellan and Stanton, the figures of Grant and Sherman are the focus, and Flood expertly brings them to life in all their complexity.

Both men were Westerners, both were West Point graduates who had floundered for years before the war (Grant with his drinking, Sherman with his failed business dealings), both began the war as obscure afterthoughts in the Western theater along the Mississippi. Both men were occasionally hounded in the press (Grant as “a butcher”, Sherman as insane, or a traitor), and neither had many natural allies in the Union army. Yet, by war’s end, they stood alone as the men who had delivered victory for the Union and literally saved the nation, along with President Lincoln.

A few thoughts and reactions, mixed with some pleasant lies (please hum “Ashokan Farewell” in your heads as you read):

-The personalities of Grant and Sherman made for quite a contrast. Grant was a man of plain manners whose stooped, stoic demeanor made him easy to underestimate. He was a clear, excellent writer who usually said exactly what he meant, and from an early point was able to see the war in it’s widest scope, and how the many moving parts would have to coordinate to achieve a final victory. He was intuitively aggressive on the battlefield, a fact that set him clearly apart from most Union commanders. On the other side, Sherman had a keen intellect made evident by the ideas that habitually came racing out of his mouth. He grasped problems in all their complexity, and though he was far more prone to racial prejudice than Grant, he shared with his friend a firm empathy for the men of the Confederate Army and longed for a hasty conclusion to the war. Indeed, while both were often criticized for their perceived brutality, they understood early on that the war would could not be won superficially or through maneuverings alone. As Sherman wrote to Grant, “[The South] cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us.”

-Contrary to some accounts, Grant’s drinking problem never fully went away during the war. He still drank whisky to excess, on occasion, although such instances always happened during quiet spells and there was never a report that he was unable to carry out his duties. Also, when drunk, he insisted that he be addressed as “General Spiderman”.

-A major newly transferred to Sherman’s command described him as “the most American looking man I ever saw.” Today, that honor belongs to Toby Keith.

-Snippets that illustrate the character of Ulysses S. Grant:

During the Battle of the Wilderness, at a point when it looked as if Lee’s army might overrun Grant’s headquarters, he was asked by an anxious officer if they shouldn’t be moving headquarters back to a safe distance. According to a witness, “The general replied very quietly, between puffs of his cigar, ‘It strikes me it would be better to order up some artillery and defend the present location.’”

Another account from later that day, after a Union general pleaded with Grant to pull back to avoid Lee being able to cut off their supplies and communications: “Grant rose to his feet, took his cigar out of his mouth, turned to the officer, and replied, with a degree of animation he seldom manifested, ‘Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you think he is about to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.’” (243)

After the conclusion of the surrender negotiations at Appomattox Courthouse, Grant stood reflecting on the steps outside a house, when Lee passed him on horseback: “Grant stopped and took off his hat. The yard became silent; every Union soldier there removed his hat and came to attention. Robert E. Lee lifted his hat once and passed through the gate…For the remaining five years of [Lee's] life, he never allowed a word against Ulysses S. Grant to be spoken in his presence.” (313)

-Grant’s beard was brown, Sherman’s was red, and Lee’s was white. The spectrum of death.

-Perhaps Grant’s greatest achievement in the war was his victory in the Siege at Vicksburg, in which he deftly coordinated his movements with ships in the Mississippi to better his angle of attack, and later intentionally cut off his army from his supply line to allow him the mobility he desired. The dramatic victory came after a long spell of Confederate victories and delivered control of the Mississippi to Federal forces. Afterwards, Grant received an astonishing letter from Lincoln. The president began by laying out all the concerns he had about Grant’s plan and how he had worried about Grant’s leadership. Lincoln then closed with, “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right, and I was wrong.” To me, this is astonishing. Where most presidents in recent memory would gloss over their misjudgments, or say that they agreed with the plan all along, Lincoln once again displayed his remarkable humility and moral character.

-Sherman liked to say, “The worst thing about war is that there’s never anything cold to drink.”

-The two men displayed an intense, tender loyalty to one another throughout the war. Both stoutly defended the other in the press and to the second-guessers in Washington, and both were quick to defer to the other’s judgement. Sherman vouched for Grant in the early days of the war when Grant was trying to overcome a reputation as a drunk and a screwup. Grant, meanwhile, tactfully smoothed over a political storm created when Sherman negotiated overly-lenient surrender terms with the last large Confederate army (this flare-up was exacerbated by Lincoln’s assassination that same week). Working behind the scenes and travelling to North Carolina to amend the terms himself, Grant allowed his friend to save face and preserve his reputation. As Sherman himself said during the war in a letter to Grant, “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and that if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.”

-Shortly after the Battle of Shiloh, an aide to Sherman walked into the general’s tent to find him in a shirts-up tickle fight with Grant. When the two finally noticed the young man watching them, they hurriedly straightened themselves up and had the aide executed for treason.

It is the timeless story of shy, lonely girl named Jennifer trying to find love in the compromised world of high school in the early ’80s. Somehow finding herself in a tangled love web between the steady, blowdried Russ and the adventurous, blowdried Gary, Jennifer eventually learns to follow her heart and properly condition her hair. Along the way, she kisses them each on the lips and lets them touch her exposed shoulders but otherwise remains as chaste as a cross-eyed nun.

Look again at the majesty of that cover. The faraway beam in Jennifer’s eyes belies the turmoil below the surface as she wrestles with her feelings for Russ and Gary and the knowledge of her secret pimple. Meanwhile, Gary’s confident charms are evident in his ruffled cuff and the subtlety of his pelvic leaning. That one, simple image tells conveys the emotional truth of the story’s turmoil. It’s like something out of Casablanca, except with better fashion and fewer Nazis.

It goes without saying that Winifred Madison is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Her work in Dance With Me makes To Kill A Mockingbird look like a retarded person’s grocery list. The fact that Dance With Me isn’t mandatory reading for all schoolchildren and that the Lincoln Memorial hasn’t been torn down in favor of an 80-foot high statue of Winifred Madison is pathetic. We’ve got a long way to go as a country to overcome the equal sins of racism and ambivalence toward this book.

In conclusion, Dance With Me is a good book. Read it, and be racist no more.

The world is awakening on this gray morning from a night of debauched, unnatural carnality. Glittering cocktails were consumed with abandon and the taut, glistening bodies of strangers found low pleasures in one another. Snowmobiles were driven at reckless speeds into mile-deep canyons. Peoples across the globe moaned in hot-blooded celebration throughout the night only to awaken to a new year, wet snow, and malaise. The world’s adrenalized gyrations have given way to ulcerous sores and loose stools. Irony’s a bitch.

Now, in 2012, fearsome packs of feral rottweilers scavenge our neighborhoods for sustenance. Menacing vagrants prowl our streets, feeling up our dogs and vomiting into our mailboxes. Oranges that were once juicy and tart are now putrid and teeming with centipedes. Is this what you wished for when you watched the ball drop last night? Are you happy now? This miserable fate is retribution for your throbbing intemperance!

Tonight, when you are being undressed and held down by squealing, perverse trolls, I hope you think back to last night’s revelry with remorse. As their ruddy, pimpled faces spit barbaric obscenities at you, perhaps then you’ll understand what your animalistic overindulgence hath wrought. No repentance or dietary cleanse will be able to save you from your fate then. Your best bet will be to keep your mouth sealed shut, your sphincter clenched, and let the rest of your body go loose.

So happy new year, everybody. I hope the end comes swiftly for your you. Thanks for reading this blog and making judgements about me as a person based on it!

I’d spend my days savoring the sweet moments of youth, bathed in a perfect golden haze. My simple, heartwarming charms would be accompanied by a twinkling piano and the dulcet tones of a smiling, fleshy-voiced narrator.The warm nostalgia would flow so thickly that it would make Tom Bosley blast his genitals off with a shotgun (if he weren’t in the grave already).

Intercutting the images of me plucking ripe apricots would be mouthwatering close ups of savory jams being spread generously on perfectly toasted bagels. On and on, the jolly narrator would blather about natural ingredients and the tangled lineage of Old Man Smuckers while I smeared the Jelly of Life across my bare torso and thighs in sensuous slow motion. Viewers would smile warmly as I convulsed in syrupy bliss and the elderly narrator would ofter a soft chuckle at my unnatural perversion.

Then the music would swell, and in wistful ecstasy I would scream out:”SMUCKERS! I GIVE MYSELF TO YOU!”

The camera would pull out, a jar of Smuckers would appear, and in the distant, hazy background I would become one with a pile of strawberries.

That’s the perfect existence, right there. Of course, my Smuckers commercial would be assailed as an abomination against God and science, causing networks to reject the ad and driving angry, sledgehammer-wielding mobs to smash and smear every last jar of Smuckers on earth, but it’d be worth it.

Smuckers: It’s worth getting fired or divorced for.

Unless you’ve lapsed into a egg nog-induced coma (henceforth to be referred to as “nogbrain”) you’re no doubt aware that the Christmas season is here. This is a glorious time of year in which children become ulcerous with anticipation and adults hazily reminisce about the disappointments of Christmases past.

Also, aunts are briefly spoken with.

Sadly, in recent years I have noted a general absence of tinsel. Once upon a time, tinsel was synonymous with Christmas. Its shiny brilliance signaled the splendor of the savior of the world coming to Earth and its cheap artificiality made it available to everyone from the portly plutocrat to the lowliest Irishman. Today, however, trees are rarely draped with tinsel. Instead they are debased with a smorgasbord of crafty knick-knacks and pop cultural twaddle. Our Christmas trees now look as if a Hallmark store vomited all over a Balsam Fir. We have traded the nobility of tinsel for fickle tchotchkes, like a man trading his Buick Regal for a single night with a Cambodian street woman.

Like all things true and pure, tinsel came from Germany. Emerging in the 1600s from the black forests of Bavaria, tinsel found favor as a simple, shiny distraction from the Thirty Years’ War and unspeakable Hessian godlessness. Much later, a single strand of tinsel was then brought to America by a doe-eyed orphan boy. The tinsel-bearing urchin was received at port by the corpulent President Grover Cleveland, who rewarded him with mustache-tickles and a pony. Newspaper accounts of this memorable encounter delighted Americans and popularized tinsel itself. All of this information and more is available in my new book, This is My Truth: The History of Tinsel & Everything Else.

I guess we’re left to try to somehow enjoy a Christmas without tinsel, which is like an Independence Day without hot dogs or a Columbus Day without scolding editorials. I’d say we’d all be better off nogbraining ourselves.

See you in my coma dreams!

In just a few moments, I’ll take my seat for the two hour bus ride into the deep recesses of Minnesota’s frigid wilderness, accompanied only by dozens of giggling pre-teens playfully stealing each other’s hats and babbling about Justin Bieber’s exquisite mouth. Sometime during the trip, I will demand silence from the students and deliver a 40 minute harangue about what it was like when I was a teenager: when Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love” blasted from every boom box and old Doc Brown was nothing more than a disgraced kook making side deals with Libyans. The students will likely stare back at me blankly, only escalating my agitation and forcing me to loudly, hurriedly tell them about all of my adventures through the circuits of time.

Once we arrive at the rustic retreat center, the students will get to spend the next 24 hours binging on nature. We will learn about owls and recycling and which girls have a crush on which boys. We will trudge through the woods in the bitter cold listening to some college student talk about wolves and wishing we could just go home where it’s warm and there aren’t as many wolves. Then, upon eating a breakfast of steamed eggs and gray, rubbery meat, the learning objectives of the retreat will have been accomplished. Probably the only thing worse than going on a middle school retreat would be the Bataan Death March, in which some 10,000 American and Filipino POWs died a cruel death. Aside from that though, this is the worst.

Fortunately for the students though, they don’t know that yet. Right now, they’re excited. I suppose I’m a little excited too, but mostly for the steamed eggs.

This is why I got my Master’s Degree.

This is my life.

Some of you readers may be rolling your eyes as if to say, “Hey Peter, snap out of it! You’ve got a loving wife and two beautiful children and a great job and a magnificent beard! You’ve got it all! Women love you and men want to be you!” Of course all these things are true, but they aren’t enough. What’s the point of having a hot wife and a sensible Hyundai Sonata if the Minnesota Vikings are 2-9?

To make matters worse, the Vikings will be facing Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos. Tebow, as you are no doubt aware, is the buzz of the NFL – a balanced blend of Johnny Unitas’s moxie and guile with St. Francis of Assisi’s piety and throwing motion. Tebow and the Broncos have shown a remarkable ability to defeat miserable, lethargic teams like the Vikings after lulling them and the entire viewing audience to sleep through the first three and a half quarters. Odds are, I and the other fans in attendance will be fed a steady diet of punts, Toby Gerhart runs and wildly errant passes for three hours amidst the dreary, unnatural ambiance of the Metrodome.

I’d rather have horrible diarrhea in a mall bathroom than do this.

However, since I’m going on the occasion of my dad’s birthday with he and my brothers, it seems only right that I should tag along, albeit sullenly. After all, my dad has given me so much over the years, and my brothers each attended my wedding, so I suppose I owe them something.

Seriously you guys, nothing matters.

Let us drape our bodies over one another as we lay relaxed on fine leather furniture. We will coil our appendages tightly together like two boa constrictors strangling a grizzly bear, yet the touch of our skin will remain soft and giving, like a fat man dry humping a cake.

Unnatural similes aside, I beckon you to join me in a sensual, mutually satisfying lounge. My arms are open and my lips are moistened slightly in anticipation of our relaxing recline into one another. In the sweet stacking of our bodies, our two essences will pool together into metaphysical union. In our repose, we will become one, just like Reconstruction make America one again, except ours will feature no flagrant racism or carpetbaggers.

A great riddle in my life has been the lack of reciprocal lounging I have been able to entice people into. Be they friends or random passersby or Tom Bosley from Happy Days, others have shown a striking resistance to my invitations. I have tried every conceivable approach to these requests, from tearful to profane to shockingly profane, and nothing seems to work. Recently I have taken to displaying myself in an enticing manner on tabletops in public spaces. This has won me only a scolding from a shift manager at Burger King.

Now that you know my history, I will make the stakes clear: without your body warmly enveloping mine, I am nothing. Without the weight of your body pressed against my chest and your breath soft on my neck, I will almost certainly throw myself into an empty mine shaft. I have lost all perspective on this.

Just give me this one thing. Come lounge upon me. It will be glorious.

Hooray for a new outtakes video! This video (like our outtakes projects in 2009, 2007, 2005, & 2003) features winning smiles, jocular belly-slaps, and giggles aplenty. It also features Todd Luker repeatedly demanding beans.

I don’t have a ton to say about this project, other than to note that it was a pleasure to assemble. I was happy that I was less promiment this time than I was in the 2007 & 2009 incarnations , though this was due more to the fact that I had fewer acting roles than any increase in my professionalism or ability to properly deliver a line. Fortunately for the ministry, Will Hines stepped in with a few well-delivered ad libs about kidnapping Al Gore’s children to save the video for us.

Enjoy the pleasure!

P.S. The song is “Skate With Me” by a Minneapolis band called Kubla Khan.

In celebration of life’s bountiful blessings, I will feast unnaturally upon turkey flesh and bun meat for hours on end. Potatoes, both mashed and scalloped, will be force-fed into my quivering potato-hole at a disturbing rate. Against the tearful warnings of my loved ones, I will proceed recklessly, like Sonic the Hedgehog on meth.

This year, my Thanksgiving will be celebrated in Minnesota’s Iron Range, where the skies are gray, the mines are depleted and and the men are mustachioed and virile. This salt of the earth setting will season my banquet with a rusty zest that pleases the tongue and depresses the economy. Smiles will be minimal and conversations will be perfunctory; the fleshy sounds of eating will be interrupted only by the occasional engorged groan.

I have already begun the process of preparing for tomorrow’s recklessness. Though a series of unpleasant stretches and unnatural devices, I have expanded my stomach volume and coarsened my vocal texture. This will allow me to safely consume an additional quart of sweet potatoes and will give my voice a rich, ragged resonance redolent of a Spanish conquistador in the throes of violent victory.

By this time tomorrow, I will be in sweet agony. My shirt will be soaked through with sweat, and my abdomen will be grotesquely distended. My lips will be raw and my my breathing irregular. My hands will be spackled with meat fragments and my thumbs will be dislocated for reasons not remembered. These are the terrible costs of Thanksgiving.

Here’s wishing all of you a similarly heedless holiday! And remember, wine makes the truth louder!

Yes, like my cats returning to lick each other’s anuses, I am once again blogging about the weather. How can I not? The first snow is always one of the most special times of the year, along with my wedding anniversary and each time I drop my wife’s phone in the toilet and don’t tell her about it.

There’s something about the first snowfall of the year that melts my heart and warms my glands. Standing at the window watching the snow come down with a half dozen Werther’s Originals in my mouth, I feel childlike and renewed. I am transported to another time and place, where yuletide carols are being amiably slurred by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Then, in my imagination, after Bing and Frank finish their song I am informed that I will be allowed to receive a hug one of the two men. However, the agonizing choice of which man to embrace reduces me to tears and Crosby refers to me as worthless trash. Magical memories.

The portly racists in the country rock band Alabama once sang of the beauty when “it’s snowing in the pines”, and (except for the racism) they were right. The soft white haze of the new snow against the trees lends a nostalgic glow to the proceedings that would make Thomas Kinkade blast his crap. It’s enough to send tears streaming down my cheeks and blood streaming out my mouth.

Savor it, my friends. The first snowfall can’t last forever. The best, most beautiful things are always so fleeting…

Enjoy the increased road fatalities!

Don’t you just want to mutilate them?

The arrogance of those people really gums up my guts. I hate how they’re constantly disparaging others and how their moist, fleshy tongues anxiously lick the spittle from their lips. I think it’s so rude the way they never really listen to other people and the way their ill-fitting shirts hang open at the bottom, exposing a hairy bowl of corpulent belly skin.

I think it’d be terrific if we could just hang those people from a bridge overpass.

Have you ever noticed that people who are arrogant and smug are also usually the same people who smother bunnies to death with American flags? What kind of sick political statement are they trying to make, anyway? I wish those people would just give us a break from their conceited snobbery and First Amendment-protected bunnysmothering.

Wouldn’t it be great if those people were paralyzed in a snowmobiling accident?

I hate how imperious and aloof those people are around the rest of us, as if being in our presence is somehow a burden. I also hate how they huff permanent markers and experience constant hallucinations that a swarm of bees is attacking them. It’s so obnoxious the way they shriek in inexpressable horror and tear away their own skin. I wish they’d give us a rest and incinerate themselves by standing behind a jet engine.

Also, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m talking about Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton.

Winter is coming!

Once again, the sun is giving us the seasonal silent treatment and we are left with a bracing chill and fading memories of happier times when the days were warm and swimming pools glistened like like an 8th grader’s forehead. Shunned by the earth’s source of energy, we are once again forced into the gruff embrace of winter, like taking a 4-month cabin retreat with Jerry Sandusky.

While walking into work this morning, I couldn’t help but notice the frigid prickle of the wind as it snatched through my sweater and tickled my friendship zone (as my wife refuses to do). It was no doubt unpleasant, but as a native Minnesotan, I am at peace with winter. I agree to shovel its snow and endure its windchills and it agrees to help me avoid small talk while outdoors and move on before Easter. True, I’m the Robin Givens to winter’s Mike Tyson in that relationship, but what are my options? Move to Florida? I’d rather blow up the planet than do that.

Florida is garbage. I heard that the Epcot center is teeming with alligators.

Speaking of cold, check this out!

Haunting, isn’t it? An underdressed toddler exposed to the cold, ostensibly for educational purposes. It’s like kindergarden in North Korea. Anyway, I’m glad the internet exists so I could show that to all of you and make my comments.

So anyway, winter’s coming, it’s getting colder, blah blah blah. My point is that I’m a miserable person.

(Incidentally, something about this blog post seems familiar. Very, very familiar.)

You see, my wife got sick on Saturday, and my daughter Alice has gotten into the unfortunate habit of not being able to fall back asleep after her (very) early morning feeding. She eats just fine, but then when my wife lays her down she starts grunting and squirming like a naked and bound obese man laid on a scorching-hot sheet of aluminium.

The wife and I, meanwhile, lay just a few feet away praying to Jesus that she would just fall asleep and we could catch maybe another few minutes of precious sleep before our son Oliver gets up and begins demanding banannas and body-slamming the cats, like some potassium-starved “Macho Man” Randy Savage.

Rather than luxuriating in deep sleep and dreams of pumpkin pie Blizzard jacuzzis, our early mornings have become a period of high anxiety, and this morning I ended up wandering around the house with Alice in an effort to get my sick wife another hour or two of sleep. But what was I supposed to do with a fidgety baby in a dark, cold living room at 4:45am? Without cable, the television offerings were less than ideal. Unable to choose between the weather station featuring an android’s voice or the Proactiv infomercial featuring the android Jennifer Love Hewitt, I flipped the TV off and ended up brushing my teeth for 20 minutes instead (once I started, I couldn’t stop because I hadn’t anticipated the difficult logistics of bending over to spit).

Eventually I was able to get Alice to fall back asleep, and by 5:30 I was on to my morning routine, bleary-eyed and an hour ahead of schedule. By drinking several quarts of coffee, I am now able to approximate human speech and emotion. However, equal parts fatigue and chemical adrenaline make for a strange morning, as my clammy, trembling handshakes to every stranger I see can attest.

The moral of my story? Young fathers, if your wife is sick, pretend to be sicker.

While I am happy with the consistency of the laughs here and the sweet sentiment, the back story of this project strongly flavors my feelings toward this video. As a church ministry, we exist to serve the needs of our congregation and our pastors, and after their experiences with recent videos like Christdome, Tax Refund Strangeness, and Small Group Fight!, their message to us was loud and clear: these things are getting weird.

Now, as you JLP readers are familiar with, I like weird. For years serving in the ministry, I restrained a lot of my weirdest impulses to try to keep the appeal as wide as possible. In the last few years, however, as our ministry has gone younger, I made an internal decision to let the younger writers run with things, acknowledging at the same time that the age of 90-second web clips has altered sensibilities for many people in that younger generation. Random gags and awkward riffs became the new normal (even, in the case of Christdome, set within a structured “message video”). Not everything worked, but a lot of it did. However, it definitely wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

So this video is a (temporary?) return to restraint and structure. It is much less tangental, much more sentimental, and features some pretty broad gags. Also, while the message of the video is about contentment, it could be categorized as a “dating video”, and we’ve never gotten less than a great response with such projects. For whatever reason, romantic tension primes people’s laughing impulse at our church.

I also think it’s a well-done project with a snappy pace, a bunch of good line gags, and an ending I love. I honestly have no idea how this will be received at church, though. Part of me suspects that people will like it because it’s relatable and sweet, but I truly don’t know. I do know that if this one gets accused of being too weird, it’s time for me to hand over the reins.

Favorite bits:

-The grape-eating marriage fantasy is my favorite gag. I remember when I was typing up the first draft, including the bit about Luke looking into the camera and announcing “This is marriage”, and smiling happily to myself. Kudos to whoever thought of that during the meeting.

-I was afraid that the grapefruit explosion gag would be too problematic to shoot and too broad to end up being any good, but I was wrong. When I saw the footage set to that music (from the climax to Glory) I was happy.

-All the Welles make an appearance in the background (Alice in utero).

-Will Hines wasn’t supposed to be in this one at all (he’s had a ton to do with another video we’re currently working on) but we needed an extra for Matt to be talking to during the “anxiety with dating” sequence so we threw him in there. He made up all the business about eating Rolos with his older cousins, and I absolutely love it. (Okay, so maybe there’s some weirdness in this one.)

Enjoy!

UPDATE: The video was received enthusiastically at church, so there you go.

The JLP has been silent and motionless for months, nagged only by the occasional buzzing of ungrateful readers and incessant spam-bot comments. While my blogging station sat vacant, the internet has been overrun with barking, bearded barbarians and man-eating rottweilers. They have entered our walls and fondled our housecats and made untoward comments to our grandmothers. No apology on my part could ever put back what was lost or heal the subconscious of those who witnessed the savage cat-rapings.

I cannot apologize, nor will I pledge to never allow this to happen again. (In fact, it is likely to happen again relatively soon.) All I can do now is try to rebuild the walls, clean up the mess, and put the cats out of their misery.

In lieu of an apology, I will offer a series of weak explanations:

1) Recently, medical experts pulled a living human being out of my wife. It was among the most disgusting and amazing things I’ve ever seen. I have taken to the young person and will raise her in my own graven image. I am proud to report that she has already learned my ways well, passing the days sleeping, screaming, and watching others clean up her poop.

2) My professional life has recently been riddled with unfortunate unexpected developments. A number of my supervisors no longer work at the school, leaving me adrift in an infinite sea of paperwork and unsolvable crises. As you can see, I have risen to the occasion by blogging about cat molestation.

3) Abraham Lincoln told me in a dream to stop blogging. Then he and Robert E. Lee touched their beards together and spoke my name in unison.

And there we are, dear readers. The situation now is bleak and unlikely to de-bleak itself anytime soon. All I can offer is my pledge to toss out a few ragged scraps of blog-chuff like this from time to time. All I ask in return is your continued loyalty and silence in my presence. It will all be over soon, by the looks of it.

Together we will calmly walk off the blogging cliff, holding hands as we fall cleanly through the air toward oblivion.

I’m pleased with how this one turned out. I think the gags are consistent, and the message works pretty effectively. Certainly, as a Christian and as a parent, I can relate to the impulse to create a “safe” cocoon inside our home or small community safe from the crappiness of our neighborhood or the attitudes of our society in general, yet that certainly is not how we are called to live as Christians. That’s the tension that supports what’s happening in this video and the concept of a Christdome. That, and the unhelpful phenomenon of creating “Christian” versions of secular products and establishments, generally to the benefit of nobody. In fact, for some Christians, these distractions can actually suck up all the oxygen in the room to the point where they don’t even exercise their own prayer life and relationship with God anymore because they’re so busy with these distracting peripheral issues.

Hopefully, we also made the video funny enough along the way, so those themes go down easy.

Stray thoughts:
-I don’t know if we maximized its potential, but the “Christian Muppet Babies” bit is a definite favorite of mine.

-The myriad fist bumps and soul patches comes out of a number of interactions I’ve had with various pastors (not my own) who, in an attempt to be “relevant”, utilize such measures. To me, fist bumps and soul patches signify “Christian hip” (not a compliment).

-I went way overboard during the shoot with extended fist bumps and overeager grabbing of my co-actors, and we had to carefully scale that stuff back in the editing stage. Unfortunately, that results in a few awkward edits, but whatever. I just need to work on being more under control when on camera, I guess.

-Here’s a still image from a deleted bit from the video that we eliminated because it was just too strange. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, but a number of people have commented pointedly that Rock TVs are getting really weird lately, and we didn’t want to push things too much on this project. (That’s for NEXT video…)

Enjoy!

My summer has been most wonderful, filled with lingering naps and indulgent glasses of rich, warm milk. I spend my evenings enjoying the cool breeze that passes through my sunroom and reading books about men from long ago with beards of finest grooming. When strangers pass down the sidewalk outside, they greet me with a friendly wave, and I reciprocate by telling them my name and warning them not to read my mind.

On Wednesdays I am visited by Colten, a young man with flaxen hair and slender knuckles. He helps me to balance my checkbook and shop for groceries. He is a functional conversationalist, and, I suspect, a skilled masseuse, though to this point he has refused to touch me, even on my neutral area. We have a private joke where he admonishes me to treat him with basic human dignity after I dip his shoes into containers filled with my own urine. I do not believe he has read my mind yet.

Wednesdays with Colten aside, the days pass aimlessly. I awaken with the imagined sound of a cat saying my full name with perfect enunciation. Sometimes in the evenings I drink more milk and make anonymous threatening phone calls to area businesses. Though my words are obscene and hateful, I assume that the targets of my harassment receive my calls with good humor. I think that having a sense of community spirit is very important.

I received the canister of your hair, and have placed it upon my mantle where it will remain until it is removed. Thank you for shearing yourself.

I hope that this humble note finds you in bright spirits. I will call on you when the weather cools and the world dons its collective sweater with an airbrushed wolf on it. Until then, I hope you enjoy the enclosed jar of mouse preserves.

Sincerely,
Rembrandt

While the book was zippy and provacative, I confess that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I anticipated. Part of this has to do with the strictures of doing an oral history rather than a traditional one – narrative threads get picked up and dropped abruptly, and context is too-often scarce. The plus side of an oral history is that the reader often gets a sharper sense of the personalities and motivations of the figures involved, liberated from most of whatever the author’s interpretation of them might be. I now know who the biggest a-holes in the history of ESPN were, and these fellows have nobody to blame but themselves.

Another issue that limited my enjoyment of the book was that it seemed to run out of trajectory about midway through. The first half of the book follows the rise of the ESPN from its humble inceptions (conceived as a cable access-style channel covering the hotbed of Connecticut sports) through it’s rise to becoming one of the dominant forces in American media. We hear about all the people who mocked the notion of a 24/7 sports station, and all the seedy behind-the-scenes tales of unhinged parties and sexual misadventures from the network’s early days. Also, lots of business deals happen and are covered in mind-numbing detail. If, for some reason, you’re deeply interested in the changing business models of the cable industry, then there’s lots of juicy stuff for you here. I confess that I often ended up skimming through those pages.

The second half of the book loses a bit of its momentum, tracking ESPN’s steps since its mid-90s ascendance. The authors try to use the various management shifts as narrative guideposts, but this is only somewhat effective. The last 300 pages start looping through predictable patterns: people complaining about management, various episodes where on-air talent said something they shouldn’t have and apologizing, and finding out which people at ESPN hate each other (i.e. Berman and Kornheiser). In and of itself, it’s interesting, but at a certain point it becomes a little repetetive.

Still, the book is breezy, and generally enjoyable. Easy weekend reading for a sports fan.

Here are a few insights gleaned from the text, thoughtfully blended with lies:

-Here’s my impression of some of the major personalities after reading the interviews…

Dan Patrick: Down-to-earth, hard-working, team player. Wrote the textbook on anchoring SportsCenter.

Keith Olbermann: Incredibly smart, gifted writer. Perhaps the best SportsCenter anchor in the show’s history. Simultaneously, unbelievably self-centered and unpleasant to work with. Paranoid, accusatory, and thin-skinned. Suzy Kolber, who never has a negative thing to say about anything else in the book says, “Keith was an unhappy person. He made a lot of people unhappy around him. I’m sure he made me unhappy.”

Chris Berman: Every anecdote blatantly glorifies himself. Energetic, simple, and sincere. (He blew a gasket when ESPN lost NFL Primetime in 2004, and rightfully so. I always felt that was the best show on the network.)

Bob Ley: Smart and grounded. Company guy.

Stuart Scott: Thoughtful and perceptive.

Tony Kornheiser: Nervous and unhappy, and very aware of both. Difficult to work with at times, but gifted.

Bill Simmons: Big ego. Calls the shots at ESPN.com, to the annoyance of his editors and some on-air folks who seem to resent him. Insightful and funny.

Jim Rome: Surprisingly gracious.

—

-Numerous sources describe the boys club that was ESPN in the 1980s. Sexual harassment of female reporters was rampant and ignored by management. In addition, the women’s “restroom” was nothing more than a crude biohazard pit dug in the lawn behind the building.

-Some of the most entertaining portions of the book have to do with the behind-the-scenes antics of management figures. The recklessly hard-drinking, loudmouthed Stu Evey towered over ESPN’s first half-decade, serving as the liaison between the network and the Getty oil company that owned it. Inexperience be damned, he insisted that his opinion be heard on every conceivable matter and spends plenty of time congratulating himself for it in the book. Years later, Mark Shapiro, a young hotshot executive took creative control of ESPN while still in his thirties. While many of his programming choices worked brilliantly (PTI, most notably) he also burned bridges and kept everyone on edge with his blunt, abrasive style.

-In order to ensure that only the most sports-obsessed work at their Bristol campus, ESPN requires all job applicants to complete a difficult sports exam and apply ointment to Tony Kornheiser’s open sores while he groans his approval.

-The folks at ESPN shamelessly credit themselves for popularizing NASCAR, poker, professional monkeybars, and Christmas trees.

-ESPN made waves in 2005 when it landed the prestigious Monday Night Football gig, thanks to the aggressive negotiations of Shapiro. At the same time, he fumbled his handling of the announcers, quickly alienating both John Madden and Al Michaels to the point where they jumped ship to NBC. Things didn’t improve when Shapiro coarsely decreed that ESPN’s own Joe Theismann’s leg be re-broken.

-In one memorable scandal, Chris Berman got in hot water while hosting NFL Primetime when he threw to a commercial break by shouting, “Segregation now, segregation forever!”