Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Chris Hayes, Gingrich yearbook, Lookalikes, Newt Gingrich, Rachel Maddow ]]> http://tullycorcoran.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/high-school-newt-gingrich-or-msnbc-host/feed/ 0 tullyc http://tullycorcoran.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/gratuitous-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond-if-you-like/ http://tullycorcoran.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/gratuitous-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond-if-you-like/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:49:56 +0000 tullyc http://tullycorcoran.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/gratuitous-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond-if-you-like/ Continue reading →]]> Some director will create a scene, probably in a television show, in which a character is caught dancing and singing to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” while doing something that is only slightly embarrassing and not at all controversial.

It’s going to be a loud crash back to earth for both Lil Wayne and Zach Galifianakis.

You will start hearing people say things like, “…back when Zach Galifianakis was funny” in the course of normal conversations. The truth will be that Galifianakis is no more or less funny than ever, but that won’t matter. It never does.

Someone will develop a musical instrument that imitates the sound of a human voice, and is capable of pronouncing and singing approximately 75 words with enough clarity that an untrained ear wouldn’t be able to tell it was a machine. The machine will collaborate with Kanye West on a song called “ones and heroes,” which will peak No. 7 on the Billboard Top 100 chart.

Intelligent life discovered in New Jersey.

Citing the cost and concerns about protecting its original content, a major metropolitan newspaper will terminate its relationship with the Associated Press.

A 22-year-old Orlando woman will contact the editors at Deadspin claiming to have photographic evidence she had sex with Tim Tebow. The photos show a man who looks like Tebow engaging in sexual acts with a young woman, but they are of poor quality and were taken from an angle at which it is not possible to see the man’s face directly. Deadspin will run the photos under a headline that reads, “This lady says these are picture of Tim Tebow having sex with her.” The majority of the public will believe the photos are authentic until it turns out the 22-year-old Orlando woman is really a 41-year-old male programmer from Atlanta.

Metta World Peace will change his name to Chad Johnson.

The makers of Axe Body Spray will intentionally get their Super Bowl ad banned.

Somewhere, at some wedding, somebody will “make it rain” on the dance floor. He will do this with toy $100 bills, and event he had been planning for weeks. He will perceive this as a “hilarious” wedding gag. Instead, somebody’s father will cry. And by “father” I mean “America.” It will probably be the groom.

Tim Tebow will propose to somebody.

The entertainment media will finally figure out that Jay-Z’s retirement announcements are just ways to get himself on TV, but they won’t be able to stop covering them because if they were to start only covering things that are news, they’d be out of a job immediately. Instead, the coverage will take a barely noticeable turn toward self-awareness.

Ryan Seacrest will start to look a little older.

Adele will lose 35 pounds, appear on the cover of every women’s magazine in the world and suddenly  be lauded as proof that “curves are beautiful.” The irony will be lost on 60 percent of the population, and 100 percent of the entertainment media. Her next album “22″ will be panned as “downright cheerful” and “a departure from the soul-crushing Adele of ’21.’” It will be a commercial failure.

With sales sagging, Pringles decides to go with tennis balls after all.

On the first waves of popular culture, wine drinking will start to be considered passe and cigar smokers will be considered “sadly clueless.”

Someone you know will buy an all-electric car and never drive it.

Through TMZ, the nation’s women will learn Casey Anthony has begun dating a “creepy but actually kind of good looking” 34-year-old entrepreneur from Las Vegas.

The sports team in your area will win some and lose some.

I am considering a life strategy of being openly antagonistic toward people I like. If I decide to go through with it, I’ll let you know so you don’t take it personally. 

Kansas’ hiring of Charlie Weis is weird. I cannot get over it. Every time I think about the reality Weis is KU’s football coach, I think, “Surely that didn’t really happen, did it?” But it did happen.

When I say this, I don’t mean to say I think it is a bad hire, but I also don’t mean to say I think it is a good hire. This is not me saying, “Holy crap, Kansas got Urban Meyer? How’d it pull that off?” But it also isn’t me saying, “KU went for Dana Dimel? Yikes.”

It is more like me saying, “Wait, Mom made pizza for Christmas dinner?”

The most surprising thing about this whole episode is that Weis wanted the KU job. I don’t mean that as an insult to KU. The Kansas job is a good enough gig that it isn’t surprising if good coaches want it. For example, I would not have been surprised if Mike Leach had accepted the job, and Leach has been more successful as a collegiate head coach than Weis has been. It’s just that Weis has his special-needs daughter, who lives in Florida. He had a good job in Florida. He could have coached in the NFL again any time he wanted to, probably with any of the three NFL teams located in Florida, even, and Kansas is so random for him.

It is possible Charlie Weis is an insufferable human being, and there may be some NFL people who would loathe to work with him, and I am not discounting the effect this may have on his prospects. But I would note that sufferability does not seem to be an important trait for football coaches at any level.

The point is, Weis could have maintained a pretty comfortable lifestyle in Florida while also keeping his family in close proximity.

Of course, no assistant coaching gig, even in the NFL, is going to pay him $2.5 million per year. It’s probably between three and five times as much as he could possibly make as an assistant. Charlie has made plenty of money in his career, but let’s not be so naive as to think the money was not alluring. Maybe he just wanted to make more money. Who doesn’t?

But according to him, he had plenty of other opportunities to coach at the collegiate level since he was  wheel-barrowed out into the front lawn at Notre Dame. We don’t know where those were, but surely they could not have been any more random than Lawrence, Kansas. Yes, he worked for the Chiefs that one year and that’s nearby. But taking a job in Lawrence just because you used to work in Kansas City is sort of like buying a Fiat because you like Italian food. They are not, you know, the same.

And then there are the things Charlie says, which are unusual. He seems to have an obsession with this idea that KU went 2-10 and K-State went 10-2. He seems to like the symmetry of it. I doubt he’d be making such a thing out of it if the numbers were off, like if KU went 3-9.

But he is really making a big thing of it, and I can’t really tell what his point is.

This is what he said to the Chicago Tribune:

“But the biggest issue is, you’re 2-10. Kansas State is 10-2. Obviously you can win in this state. So I’m saying to myself, you’re coming to a school that’s 2-10. The other school is 10-2. Just think about it. If you, in one year, you get to .500, you went from 2-10 to 6-6 —v I don’t know how many games we’ll win next year. I’m not projecting. I’m not giving you a timetable. But just with hard work and strength and conditioning and better coaching and the guys buying in — you get to .500, all of a sudden, you’ve made the program relevant again. Because what you want to do is you want to be the school that’s 10-2 in the state of Kansas. Around here, they won’t even mention them. Why wouldn’t you mention them? They’re 10-2 and you’re 2-10, that’s who you have to beat! You gotta beat them in recruiting and you gotta beat them on the field.

Why is that? Do you have any idea why one school would be 2-10 and 10-2? Do you have any idea why that would happen? Neither do I. I have to sit there and say, if I’m 2-10, and they’re 10-2, I should be able to get to that point. I don’t know how long it will take to get to that point, but that’s where we should be able to get. They’re already doing it. And they win on a fairly regular basis there. So there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to win on a fairly regular basis here.”

You tell me what he’s trying to say, there. It seems like he has simply observed that Kansas went 2-10 and Kansas State went 10-2 and is pointing out that this is problematic for KU. Further, he acts like there is some mystery as to how this happened. He asks us (all) if we have any idea why that would be, and he asks this question rhetorically. He thinks he is making a point by asking it. But I’m guessing you all, like I, have some pretty good ideas as to how this happened, and given that Weis is the guy who is charged with changing it, it is a little disturbing that he thinks it’s a mystery (and assumes we all think so too).

He then told Bob Fescoe he would be leaving when his contract expired in five years, and he told the Tribune he wanted to stay in college coaching because you don’t have to work as many hours and, well, it just seems an awful lot like Charlie took the KU job without really thinking about it much. It seems like he would have been just as likely to take the job if it were at Kentucky, and at this point I’m not even sure he knows the difference. He just wanted to coach someplace where the football team sucked.

So that’s why it seems weird to me Charlie wanted the job.

But it also seems weird that KU wanted Charlie. Now, I think anyone who has paid attention to coaching hires in sports knows that you always go opposite of the guy before. If the guy before was nice, you hire a mean guy. If the guy before was a discliplinarian, you hire a “players coach.” That’s how it is everywhere, but it has been especially true at Kansas. The last 30 years of KU football hires have followed this pattern with almost comical reliability.

But this one ventures a little into the surreal, doesn’t it? They went from huge, mean offensive genius to strapping former Heisman candiate and all-around nice guy right back to … a huge, mean offensive genius? Does Charlie Weis have a dog named Yogi?

I don’t want to be mean about this. I really don’t. But this can’t be ignored. People talk about Mark Mangino’s weight being an issue, but at least he walks around under his own power. I don’t think Charlie’s health issues should have disqualified him as a candidate, but if they wanted Mangino again (which they didn’t), they should have just hired Mangino again (which they sort of did).

When we evaluate coaching hires, we are not really making a judgment about the coach. We’re making a judgment about the school. In most people’s minds, the coaching hierarchy is fairly clear. At the top you have your Urban Meyers and Nick Sabans and Pete Carrolls. At the bottom you have your no-name assistants and small-college guys. Somewhere in the middle you have your re-tread coaches, guys who weren’t quite successful enough satisfy a blue-blood fanbase or who did something wrong and got pushed out, but who are generally still regarded as quality football coaches.

A successful hire is one in which the level of the coach is commensurate with the level of the school. A home run hire is when the coach is better than the school (Bob Huggins at Kansas State). A failed hire is when the school is better than the coach (whoever replaces Steve Jobs at Apple).

It seems to me the Weis hire favors Kansas, at least a little bit. People talk about how he did not win big at Notre Dame. But that’s irrelevant. For one thing, comparing Notre Dame to any other coaching situation is a failed comparison. For another, I don’t know if anybody has noticed, but nobody has won big at Notre Dame in 20 years*.

*Except for Charlie Weis, who in 2005 had the Irish in position to play for the national title until Reggie Bush obviously cheated by pushing Matt Leinart into the end zone, winning a game that, according to the NCAA, never even happened.

Many folks also have noted his success with the New England Patriots seemed to have a lot to do with Tom Brady and that his offense at Florida this year, according to my SEC-loving friend Jacob, “couldn’t score in a whorehouse.”

These are all valid concerns, but if they did not exist, Weis might be the coach at Ohio State right now, instead of Kansas. It’s that hierarchy thing. I think Sheahon Zenger, the Kansas athletic director, did well to get a coach of Weis’ quality, and if Weis was the only available coach at that level (which he probably was) then I consider it a good hire.

I just can’t believe it actually happened.

Pay attention next time you’re at an NFL game or watching one of the pregame shows when they show these guys warming up. They’re so happy. They’ve got their Beats on, they’re in the sweat pants, they’re going at approximately 31 percent effort. Not five minutes ago, I watched Houston Texans receiver Jacoby Jones dance on the field for a solid minute. They love it. 

It’s difficult to know exactly why, because I am not an NFL player. But here’s my theory: They are feeling the excitement of game day. Everybody loves game day. It is the reward for all the work. So that’s part of it. Another part is that during the warmup, there is nothing at stake. So they can wear the sweat pants and jog through their pass routes and throw lazy out passes. The point is only to loosen the muscles, so it is the only part of their week when they are not expected to be moving and thinking at 100 percent of their capacity. Also, the Beats. 

But I think the real key to it is deeper than that. Before the game begins, they are winners. That’s how high-level athletes see themselves. They believe they will win the game. They believe they will win their individual matchups. They believe this because, for the most part, their whole lives have gone this way. There aren’t many losers in the NFL. 

They KNOW they will succeed, because they know they are awesome. It is the one moment of their week when they do not have to confront reality. Monday and Tuesday are about recovering from Sunday. Wednesday through Saturday are about worrying about the opponent. Kickoff is when the reality that the other team is also full of winners sets in. 

The warmup is a break. It is willful, scheduled ignorance. It is bliss.

These are not words I ever would have imagined writing, because the Flint Hills are hilarious. In case you don’t know, there is a swath of earth that stretches from central to northeast Kansas which is known as “The Flint Hills.” There are signs for it.

It is nothing, really, except unadulterated Kansas. In the spring it is green and soft. In the fall it is golden and crunchy. Tall yellow grass waves as you pass. You may see some cattle here and there, a windmill off in the distance, a rusty reminder that some day long ago some family settled up there. The houses are always long gone. But that’s it. You can’t call the Flint Hills “settled,” because there is nobody there, and hasn’t been for ages.  It doesn’t take much imagination to think about Native Americans who once lived out there, where the buffalo roam. The terrain is uninhabited, unfarmed and unvisited. We are all just passing through on the way to someplace else.

The funny thing about the Flint Hills is not the Flint Hill themselves, but that they are seen as an attraction. You are greeted by a limestone sign as you enter them, “Welcome to the Flint Hills.” You have arrived. You have arrived nowhere. Which is supposed to be the point, I think.

Brady grew up in Louisiana and Buffalo and went to college in Ann Arbor. He now works for the newspaper in Kansas City, and drives through the Flint Hills to Oklahoma at least twice a year. He marvels at them. He thinks there are tourism dollars to be made there. Brady, I remind you, is not a business man. He is a newspaper man, which is the opposite.

But Brady is a romantic, and the Flint Hills seduce him. They have that effect. My wife and I were driving back to Kansas from our home in Houston this last weekend. It was still light out when we passed through the Flint Hills, but the sun was tucking itself in. There are days in Kansas when the air is crisp and dry, but the sun is warm in a cloudless sky. It feels like walking in from a snowball fight and finding your mom baking something. The flannel sunlight lays on top of the dry cold, and if you have a sweater on, it is perfect. A lot of places aren’t quite like that. A lot of places sit near bodies of water, and the cold feels different there. It’s a little wet and a little heavy. I’m thinking of Chicago or Minneapolis. Even Houston gets that way when it’s cold, which isn’t often. The wind comes right off the Gulf of Mexico. In Kansas, it has dried out before it gets there. In Kansas, paradise comes in small packages.

It was one of those days we were driving through. We agreed that one day we’d like to move back to Kansas, back to Lawrence, specifically. We had our first date there. We got married there.

Life is good in Houston. There is no state income tax, jobs  a plenty, the winter is mild, real estate is affordable, and the Mexican food will sit you back in your chair. We like it here. We want to settle in. Our kids, should we eventually have some, might think of this as home.

But home whispers to you when you go near it, and we felt that. Yes, we thought, maybe some day we will come back. We’d like that.

That was Saturday afternoon. On Saturday night, I stood in downtown Lawrence, right outside the Red Lyon. The wind was up. The temperature was down. The door guy stood there smoking a cigarette, and I wondered if he was doing it to keep warm. I had on two shirts, but they didn’t stand a chance.

It stayed that way through the night and into Sunday morning, and when we were leaving, set out for an a.m. pass through the Flint Hills, we both agreed it was a good reminder that things are never quite as romantic as you remember them.

With the game on the line, and your back against the wall and the opposing crowd collapsing your eardrums, can you look a teammate in the eye and make them believe? Can you stand in the pocket and have the courage and the discipline to still hit the checkdown guy, when every fiber within you wants to go deep? Will you trust your teammates, and will your teammates trust you? Will you do the right thing?

For many years, Penn State did not award athletic scholarships. The school restarted that practice in 1949, and that was the last year a player who had not been brought to Penn State on scholarship had started at quarterback. In 2009, McGloin enrolled at Penn State and tried out for the football team. He had been an all-state quarterback.

It was still just the second quarter when McGoin entered the game. Penn State led 14-7, but it was on the road and down to the walkon who didn’t really practice. This was bad.

When this season started, nobody quite new what to make of this kid. Some thought he should be the starter, some didn’t. Everybody seemed to agree Penn State was in bad shape at the position. Oct. 29, McGloin played terribly against Illinois, but led a game-winning drive. Last Wednesday, Paterno was still saying he had a two-man rotation at quarterback between McGloin and Bolden. McGloin said he has always felt it was his role to be a leader, whether he was on the field or not.

That was Nov. 3. Six days later, McGloin’s world was collapsing around him. A child rape scandal had crushed Penn State. Penn State’s leaders, from position coaches to the beloved Paterno, for whom McGloin had longed to play, who had given him a shot, and then a scholarship, to the athletic director to the president had run and hid when things got tough. All it takes for evil to prevail, they say, is for good men to do nothing. Penn State’s men, good or not, had done nothing, to horrific, disgusting consequence. They’ve mostly canned the cowards, Paterno included.

A riot broke out on Penn State’s campus. Police horses, mase, chaos. The angry, irrational mob couldn’t believe their hero, Paterno, had been canned after all those years. Eyeball around the nation watched in incredulous disgust that this — this? — is what these students are angry about? This is Penn State?

This proud brand was going up in flames. Paterno, a hero to many, surely McGloin, had become national villain. The world, quite literally, was against Penn State. And will be. Imagine how hurt Matt McGloin must be, how angry, how disappointed. Just chaos. Within and without.

McGloin did what he could do. He pulled up his Twitter page.

“This is a tough time,” he wrote. “But the outrage we are feeling now is nothing compared to what the victims are going through. Keep them in our prayers.”

Finally, a leader emerges at Penn State.

I don’t have a lot to say about Andy Rooney. This isn’t going to sound like one of those hilarious Tim Kurkjian monologues where he exhausts the catalog on somebody’s career and then tries to put them in their proper historical place.

But I did want to say this:

There are not many television personas or even “things in general” that had existed my entire life. That list is like four things long. It’s Andy Rooney, Big League Chew, Sesame Street and Monday Night Football. I cannot remember a time when he was not on TV (mostly because that time predates my lifetime). My family watched 60 Minutes quite a bit, and I was often watching because it came on right after the late football game. Even at 10 and 11 years old, I liked Andy. I liked how he would talk about societal minutia. I liked how he was always complaining about how the world was changing, and he was able to communicate that sentiment to someone to young to have ever experienced that sensation himself.

I had never thought about this before Andy died, but he has to have been part of the reason I ended up wanting to become whatever it is I have become. Andy Rooney, Rick Reilly and Bill Nye the Science Guy were my introduction to social commentary.

It is probably something other than a coincidence that the vast majority of the content of this blog is of no real societal import whatsoever.

We can debate whether or not this latest Lady Gaga flashfire is a country song or not. In fact, I had just that debate with the wife on Friday night. She contended that Lady Gaga’s “You and I” was really more of a rock ballad than a country song, and unlike me she is from western Kansas, so she probably knows.

The producer on the track is a guy named Robert “Mutt” Lange, who in addition to being of mixed pedigree has also been a producer for both Def Leppard and Shania Twain. The song samples “We Will Rock You,” by Queen, which is perhaps the least country band of all time.

In any case, the song sounds country to me. Actually, the song sounds so country that I’m pretty sure Lady Gaga is making fun of people from the Midwest. I think the song is partially satirical. How else can you explain the following line:

Muscle cars drove a truck right through my heart.

I want to take a step back here and say that I am not offended by this song. I am not complaining about this song. This is not a 500-word eff you to Lady Gaga, whose work I have come to appreciate on some level. But there are two things about that line that stand out:

1) It is nonsensical. It has no literal or metaphorical meaning.

2) But it triggers two iconic heartland images: Muscle cars and trucks.

This alone doesn’t make it a country song, but that kind of imagery is almost always used when someone is trying to appeal to country people. The following two photos are stills from the video for Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.” (which we have covered before):

Miley doesn't sing about muscle cars and trucks, she sings on top of them.

Miley doesn't sing about muscle cars and trucks, she sings on top of them.

This is the point where a fan of “real” country music will pipe in and remind me that neither Lady Gaga nor Miley Cyrus nor Billy Ray Cyrus nor Taylor Swift has ever made a real country music song. All of this I’m talking about is just crossover country at best or pop music with a country influence at worst. These are people who like artists like George Strait and Hank Williams (Sr.). They are probably right about this in the same way my friend Rob, a native New Yorker, is right when he says Chicago-style pizza isn’t really pizza, “it’s casserole.”

I would note that one of Williams’ most famous lines is “I got a hot rod Ford and a two-dollar bill,’ but to a purist there are some really important distinctions there. To most of us, though, country music is just music that sounds a little twangy and refers to things like daddies and trucks and the Tastee Freeze and lost love. So to most of us that’s exactly what Lady Gaga has done here. First of all, the setting for this little narrative is Nebraska, and the narrative itself is about this woman who is wearing lipstick and high heels and has come back in town after some time and will not be leaving without her lost lover, who owns a little bar somewhere in Nebraska. He has experienced a lot of lonely nights in this little bar and in a town we presume is not, you know, Omaha. But there is something about this place, and something about “you and I.” That this is a grammatical error does nothing to ruin the country feel.

She then belts this non sequitur:

There’s only three men I’ma serve my whole life, it’s my daddy and Nebraska and Jesus Christ.

I, of course, don’t know what was going through her head when she wrote this song. She says it is actually about one of her own relationships, but that’s only possible in a thematic sense. Lady Gaga was born and raised in New York City. The song, however, was recorded in Nebraska (for some reason). But whether she set out to make a pop country hit or set out to make a satirical pop country hit, she made a hit out of a song that feels pretty country.

And that forces us to ask a question: If Lady Gaga can make a successful country record, does that say more about Lady Gaga or country  music?

As many of you know, I have recently written a book. It’s true. You can buy it and everything. Perhaps it will wind up in libraries.

Now, when I say I wrote this book, I probably mislead you a little bit. It is true that I sat down and personally typed all the words that appear within it and that those words appear in the order of my choosing and that the cadence and much of the book’s vocabulary were generated in my head. But I did not write this book in a pure sense, because I was writing the thoughts and experiences of another person as if I were him, and this person is non-fictional.

This person was Tyrel Reed — Kansan, lover of Dr. Pepper and erstwhile Kansas Jayhawk. Tyrel and I spent hours and hours and hours talking about his life, going through it year by year, topic by topic. I would ask a question and sort of let him go with it, recording everything. We spent one especially engrossing weekend parked on the couch at my apartment in Lawrence, which was conveniently still furnished because the Mrs. hadn’t moved down to Houston yet.

I would then transcribe these conversations and turn those transcriptions into actual narrative copy and send them to Tyrel for review. He would change a word here or there and sometimes decide he’d rather not say publicly what he had said to me. He is a good copy editor. Very detail oriented, which was good, because I am not that way. This was, after all, his book with his name and photo on the front, written in the first person. My role was to take his thoughts and express them pleasingly.

So you can’t exactly say I wrote this book, but you can’t really say he did, either. Which is why both of our names appear on the byline, I guess.

But enough about the technical process.

I have always wanted to write a book, and have, beginning at age 10, begun writing three or four of them in my lifetime. All novels, of course. My first one, which I started typing on my parents’ IBM-compatible computer in 1993 — I think they bought this computer in about 1989. It had a black screen and you typed in MS-DOS. Windows was still in the future, so you had to remember all these keystroke combinations to load the program. — was a more or less plotless narrative about three boys my age stumbling upon an abandoned grain elevator and finding a bunch of cool old stuff in it, including a truck. My second one, which I started at age 12, was a novel about an American spy who was trying to accomplish something or another in Russia. He drove a Porsche and wore leather jackets and flew airplanes. He was basically the man I still aspire to be.

I didn’t get real close to finishing either of them.

In adulthood, I have usually had a Word file on my computer I use when I feel an impulse to write something. I have written maybe 10,000 words of narrative fiction in this thing. I’d tell you about it, but I’m really self-conscious about people seeing what I’m writing before it’s done. It just throws me all off. This is true even of the things I write in my daily work.

The point of all this is that writing a book is something I have always wanted to do, but never knew how to do. When I took on the Reed All About It project, I was intimidated. I would have to write a 60,000-word manuscript in six weeks. I don’t t know whether that sounds like a lot to you or not, but it sounded like a lot to me. I was surprised this was even considered to be possible. Considering I do have a full-time job, it was going to mean a lot of 10 p.m. pots of coffee. It kind of made me wish I smoked cigarettes. It would look pretty cool to be sitting at a desk with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, pounding at the keys. You have to admit that. I suppose I could have taken up smoking for a six-week period, but that seems kind of risky. Besides, nobody was seeing me except the wife and the dog, and their perceptions of my coolness are pretty well ingrained by now (respectively: uncool, cool).

Alas, I don’t think I looked very cool while I was writing this thing. It was a lot of me in the living room chair with tassled hair, wearing basketball shorts and a t-shirt, and the laptop on the ottoman. I don’t think this was  good for my neck.

But while I didn’t make me any cooler, it did make me another thing. It made me aware that it is possible to write a 60,000-word book in six weeks and that I am capable of doing it. This is an important realization. Maybe I’ll finish that spy novel, now.

This would seem like the least likely outcome of the technology that made Internet video possible. If you had known in 2003 that YouTube would exist in its current form, you almost certainly would not have anticipated that a series of TV networks would devote programming to the hosted broadcast of YouTube content and be successful at it.

Pretty much all there is to it.

Internet video — in this context meaning user-created and Internet-hosted — has actually made televised video more popular.

What this proves (and what nobody seems willing to realize) is that the Internet is not nearly as convenient a device as we all think it is.

Now, this is not me ripping the Internet, which is indisputably amazing. It is fantastic for certain things:

1) Instantaneous communication

2) Free expression

3) Intellectual larceny

4) Storage of information

Most of what people like about the Internet falls under at least one, usually two, of those categories. Most of what people hate about the Internet falls into at least one, usually two, of those categories.

But — and here’s the thing people never talk about — the Internet is not (always) convenient. There are many things we use the Internet for that it is not best equipped to execute.

The triangle offense being chief among them.

For example, let’s say you want to know as much as you can about what’s happening in your city and you have 11 minutes to learn it. Your best bet, by far, is to pick up your daily newspaper.

It's that thing in the plastic bag on your grandmother's porch.

All of that same information is available on the Internet, but it is going to take you twice as long to consume it all, even if you go to that very newspaper’s Web site, where you invariably will spend a good deal of your 11 minutes clicking around, canceling out pop-up ads and misunderstanding hyperlinks.

You will end up reading most likely a third the number of stories and you will probably just update your Facebook status.

For another example, let’s say you want to watch some viral videos. You could go to any number of Web sites that attempt to aggregate that kind of content, or you could go straight to YouTube. But you will end up wasting a lot of time on links that don’t interest you. The very thing that makes that content possible (total freedom of expression) is what makes it awful; because anybody can contribute, it is saturated with garbage.

Or you could just watch a TV show, produced by professionals who understand what makes good TV, hosted by a professional who adds to the experience, and filtered by living humans with functional garbage filters.

The best way to watch YouTube is to simply watch the tube.