Brorein St

While in clerkship exile in Tampa, my bro Dustin found the time to capture this stirring image. Feast your eyes.

Big Buck Hunter

so this evening my friend brian started me on a life-long journey.

it's name is big buck hunter.


this game is absurdly addictive. i highly recommend it.

Vegas Poker

a shot from behind my stack of $5 chips (with a precariously placed $2 chip on top) at seat 1 of a $1-$3 no limit hold 'em table in the caesar's palace poker room in vegas

Taxi Strike!

just a heads-up if you haven't heard yet -- dc taxi drivers are striking on wednesday in response to fenty's switch to meters:

Organizers said more than half the city's estimated 7,500 drivers will be on strike from 6 a.m. tomorrow to 6 a.m. Thursday. Their claims were difficult to gauge, however, because there have been no mass meetings on a strike, and drivers, most of them independent contractors, are represented by several organizations.

but chin up:

Even if half of the District's drivers strike, the city would have more cabdrivers working than Boston, with 1,825 licensed drivers; San Francisco, 1,381; or Denver, 842.

can't wait for those meters!

A Call to Arms Electronic Pointing and Key-Entering Computer Peripherals

drop me a line if you have a blog with its url, i'd like to get a blog-roll going in that vast barren space in the right column

My Thoughts on ESPN

like most people who actually give this topic some semblance of thought, i am endlessly annoyed by espn's entire philosophy.

the latest article by espn's ombuds(woman?) and former nytimes editor le anne schreiber crystallized a lot of my frustrations towards espn:

... [F]actuality has been devalued in 24/7 sports media. If you look at the proportion of airtime and cyberspace devoted to reporting fact versus delivering opinion on ESPN, ESPN.com and ESPN Radio, it is clear that the main function of sports news is to serve as the molehill on which mountains of opinion are built. We don't have news cycles anymore. We have opinion cycles.

espn will show a 15-second highlight reel of an ACTUAL GAME, then engage in a 5-minute debate over whether alex rodriguez will opt out of his contract ... do you remember those weeks where you'd tune into "nfl live" and see 90% of every show devoted to staking out t.o.'s house?

espn comes up with one of these "cycles" just about every week or two, but the worst ones in recent memory were:

mcnabb v. t.o.!
mcnabb's a racist!
joe torre is quitting!
bill belichick's "spygate"!
notre dame and/or michigan hasn't won a game yet!
kobe bryant's "rape"!
duke lacrosse "rape"!

not only does espn focus on these largely meaningless and sensational fixations, but they rarely actually report any, you know, real FACTS about these "stories" ... the most annoying moment of every one of these "debates" is when one of the bloviating talking heads throws his hands up and says "i wish we didn't have to talk about this!"

you know what? you don't have to talk about this crap!! just shut up and play the clips! instead of talking out of your ass for 60 seconds, how about you actually play a clip from an actual game, and then tell us how the play developed or why this stretch of the game was important to its outcome

instead of sticking slavishly to an agenda of pimping certain popular teams or particular "storylines" you developed at the beginning of the season, how about you spend time talking about what's ACTUALLY HAPPENING on the field ... does anyone know that the cleveland browns have one of the best offenses in the nfl this year? of course not! why should they?! it's not like espn would actually take time from discussing why mangenius is 1-35 or how the saints might turn it around real soon

not to get too far afield (shit, this is about 2000 words already, who cares), but many "real sports fans" rip on fantasy sports players because they "don't care who wins the games" ... but people who want to succeed in good fantasy sports leagues are forced to follow actual trends, even if they don't exactly fit into a ready-made storyline

the absolute worst sport for this kind of "stick to the storyline" agenda is baseball, where, outside of a few conscientious journalists on baseball tonight, it's almost impossible to hear about the actual ebbs and flows of a season ... espn creates a storyline, filled with large market teams, and dutifully reports on their wins or losses ... if the pirates get hot for a two-week stretch, or the fourth starter for the twins has a better month than schilling, you'd barely hear a word

you know who i really blame for this mess? the idiot drooling sports dude (yes, i mean men) who only likes hearing about names he already knows and could really care less about what's actually, you know, happening ... it's a comparable demographic to the housewives (yes, i mean women) who watch the morning talk shows and get all worked up into a tizzy about the latest cute white girl to go missing in south dakota while their health care and civil liberties are stripped away

in a perfect market, we might actually have competitors to the beast, but with the monopoly espn holds on the national sports media and sets the sports agenda in this country, it's nearly impossible for other voices to gain real traction ... espn has no viable competitors on television, national radio, or big, comprehensive sports websites, so with this lock-down they can just keep slurping up the lowest-common-denominator viewer with the drivel they put on the air

as you can see, i get a little fired up about this.

one sports tv show that does it right is inside the nfl on hbo ... it features long highlight reels carefully constructed by nfl films and (relatively) thoughtful commentary led by bob costas ... espn's nfl matchup is another informative, sober show (what a surprise, it's also affiliated with nfl films) that largely avoids most of the crap i talked about in this post

i'll end this diatribe with a great quote from schreiber's column:

My concern, though, is less for Gundy or Belichick than for viewers and readers who grow fat on the fast food of opinion while starving for reported fact. "ESPN used to be a place where sports news was reported," wrote one of the many readers who complained about the two Easterbrook articles on Belichick. "Now it's just a factory for controversy. I guess in that way it's just a microcosm of America media in general, but that does not make it any less distasteful."

on that note, back to monday night football on espn!

Bud Light News Team

does anyone else find this bud light ad just a bit unseemly? seems like a light-hearted ode to functional alcoholism.

Ian MacKaye Sighting

for the uninitiated, there's a whole class of people in this city whom we washingtonians refer to fondly as "famous for d.c." ... the term usually refers to media types or politicos (did you see chris cillizza chatting with harold ickes at safeway today?!) about whom people in a less wonky city could care less

d.c.'s rock scene is about as nerdy and insular as beltway politics, so our local music luminaries have that same "famous for d.c." feel

with that lengthy back-story, i was browsing through CDs at crooked beat today with stephanie when i spotted d.c. music legend and notorious kill-joy ian mackaye:


ian was in front of me in line, buying some obscuro vinyl records, while i trotted up to the counter with the new discs from mainstream indie bands the new pornographers and band of horses ... i felt DEEPLY embarrased for not purchasing out-of-print seven inch singles by some defunct st. paul hardcore group

Coors. The Banquet Beer.

you know what's really got my goat? those annoying coors spots that the ad wizards have been playing nonstop during football and baseball lately ... it features this horrible butt-rock anthem urging us punters to not expand our horizons and just reeks of small-minded bullshit ... it also reminds me a lot of The Worst Ad Campaign of the Century ... not a surprise coming from thankfully-not-a-u.s.-senator pete coors



i like jason's take on the ad:

You may be fortunate enough to marry a woman who’ll actually put up with your refusal to change. After 20 years of marriage you’ll no longer be attracted to her because she’s about twice the woman you married. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the “leadership” you provided at home and the fact that you’re about two and half the man you were when you were married. Nope, four squares a day, four to five showers a week, and a one to two dates a year. That’s how you make it to twenty years. Forget the fact your wife has to get her romance from novels and soaps and you never talk.

Verne Lundquist is ON today

veteran sportscaster (and keith jackson wannabe) verne lundquist has been on fire while broadcasting the world's largest outdoor cocktail party this afternoon.

in the span of five minutes verne made a witty reference to tim russert's ridiculous hand-drawn statistics and to the classic "boom goes the dynamite" clip ... this sly bastard always holds himself out as the old out-of-touch guy, but then he slips in little gems like this

well done, verne, well done

Jens Lekman @ Black Cat 10/25/07

so i picked up "oh you're so silent jens" in early 2006 and jens lekman quickly became one of my favorite singer/songwriters

jens combines stephin merritt's baritone, unbelievable knack for melody, and quirky song topics with morrissey's acerbic wit and sufjan stevens' lush orchestral arrangements ... but while sufjan and morrissey can get self-important and annoying, jens always winks at himself and keeps things whimsical ... there is so much great music out of scandinavia these days, and jens sits at the top of that list

anyway, i think "black cab" best sums up what jens is all about:



his latest album, "night falls over kortedala", came out earlier this month and it is (predictably) fantastic

jens has toured america a couple of times in the last couple of years, but has always skipped over DC ... so when i saw he was scheduled to play at black cat, i snapped up tickets really quickly ... i was more psyched up for this show than i have been for a long long time (maybe the shins' first DC show at black cat in early 2004 or arcade fire in their first DC show at 9:30 club in early 2005) ... usually when i get really excited for a show it's hard for it to meet or exceed my lofty expectations, but jens really knocked it out of the park

the washington post wrote:

If the boyish 26-year-old isn't yet a certifiable pop music genius, his inspired performance in front of an enraptured sellout crowd proved that he's at least well on his way.

and summarized the encore thusly:

Set closer "Pocketful of Money" took a reliably horrible gimmick -- Lekman and the audience singing a round, in unison -- and made something truly magical out of it. Even Lekman admitted it was the "most beautiful" version of that song to date and to play anything else would simply ruin the moment.

check it out for yourself:

Bud Light Ad

for some reason i really like this ad:



the kicker is great

You are Broseidon, lord of the brocean.

Welcome to muh blog!!

OK, first things first: who, pray tell, is Broseiden? Well, like a super-sweet episode of Law & Order, this blog's title is ripped straight from the [fake] headlines.

Much like the busty proprietress of a 17th-century Parisian salon (they really went to shit in the 1700s), I shall, in these august pages, lead important discussions on, inter alia, important matters of great import: television commercials, sports, music, politics, wingnuts in Florida, viral videos, the law, Washington D.C., movies, suburban sprawl, et cetera.

Whew. I'm exhausted from writing this meager post. Maybe I'll just take the path trodden by so many bloggers who came before me: trumpet the opening, then get lazy and never update. We'll see.