Thursday, February 28, 2019

David Sims Got It Wrong: Weezer, the Universe and Everything

I sort of lost my mind this week, and instead of grading papers or teaching students, I wrote a six-thousand word philosophical/musical epic that begins with an allegorical analysis of the SNL Weezer skit. 



My post is called The True Meaning of the SNL Weezer Sketch (and the True Meaning of Weezer, the Universe, and Everything). 

Read it if you dare.

While it starts with Weezer, it ends up getting pretty deep. I mainly wanted to clear up what David Sims said about the sketch in an Atlantic article: The Saturday Night Live Sketch That Sums Up All Online Discourse.

Sims really missed the point of the skit. It's not about how people immediately escalate all debate to personal cruelty and incendiary rhetoric on the internet. My friend Kevin and I have been having this exact same Weezer debate in regular old meatspace since 2005 . . . since they released Make Believe and the awful song "Beverly Hills." The over-the-top rhetoric in the skit is totally valid because theJones and Damon are discussing the ultimate question in identity: where lies my essence? Is there such a thing as a permanent and unchanging soul? So it's fine to get all wound up. I don't want to get into it all here, but if you're a Weezer fan and you like to contemplate profound questions on the nature of character and the permanence of objects, then you might enjoy the post. I also included plenty of pictures.

More importantly, I want David Sims to read the post and offer a retraction of his theory. How do we get this post to a senior editor  at the Atlantic Magazine? Sims can offer his retraction in the comments, I don't need an actual video. Otherwise, he can drink my hot blood.

52 comments:

  1. his twitter handle is @davidlsims. but i bet he's somewhere right now feeling a disturbance in the force, so he'll probably find your screed on his own.

    also, in unrelated news, mini-summit in leesburg on saturday night. celebrating mr and mrs kq and seeing live music.

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  2. Hot blood sounds gross. I would like to be called "Cool Blood." I am not smooth enough to pull it off. But it would be cool if I were.

    What's up, Cool Blood?

    Nothin', man. Not a damn thing.

    That's cool, Cool Blood.

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  3. so can i send a tweet to him? is that possible?

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  4. black album release tomorrow. sounds like it's a hot mess.

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  5. i'd like to live-tweet dave's efforts to try to tweet david sims.

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  6. Bryce Harper to the Phillies. Jason Witten coming back. Neat x 2.

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  7. i might have tweeted at him. we'll see. i'm sure he reads g:tb. the atlantic also steals your stuff.

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  8. the atlantic has, in fact, been known to steal my stuff.

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  9. tribe at towson tonight. a win in a place that's been a house of horrors for w&m might convince me to have a scintilla of hope that tony shaver's figured something out down the stretch. dammit.

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  10. Hit the Rastaman, he said bloodclot

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  11. Truman Capote’s working title was In Cool Blood but he realized he couldn’t pull it off, either

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  12. Hahaha Phillies. Dude has had one 100 RBI season, and that was the number. Two 100+ run seasons and two 30+ HR seasons. I can’t believe Boras suckered him into that many years.

    He’s also a dickhead.

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  13. There are other stats they look at more these days. Unfortunately for Philly, they aren’t any more favorable. After a WAR of 10 three years ago, he’s had 2 of the past 3 seasons with a WAR under 2. 2 wins a year for that amount of cash and clown question bro to boot. Hope is goes the way it’s trending.

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  14. fuckers are gonna get my hopes up, only to dash them. lather, rinse, repeat.

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  15. In the midst of a playoff push (no, really) the Magic have gone out in their last four games and lost to the Bulls and Knicks and beat the Raptors and Warriors. Sure. Makes sense.

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  16. apparently the dodgers offered harper 4/168. one of you finance geeks should tell me if that's a better deal in terms of npv than the 13/330 deal he accepted. or what he'd need to do in his next deal to make the dodgers' deal better. 330 guaranteed is nothing to sneeze at, for sure. but wonder if the expected value of the dodger deal plus a smaller, still good-sized follow-on would be more.

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  17. Rob, you went to business school. Figure it out.

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  18. Assuming 2.5% annual inflation, the PV of the $330M contract is $285.8 million.

    The PV of the $168 million contract is $162 million.

    So while the headline dollar value says one contract is only 51% of the value of the other, an inflation-adjusted PV says it was 57% of the other.

    What Harper could have done was given up a couple years at the end to get an opt-out after 4-5 years. But the issue is that an owner may feel More comfortable giving a 13-yr contract to a 26 y/o than giving a 9-yr contract to a 30 y/o.

    It’s all ball bearings these days.

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  19. i went to business school because i want to tell people what to do, not do things myself.

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  20. Fuck baseball and math, we need more punk rock in here.

    http://www.openculture.com/2019/02/the-100-great-punk-songs-of-all-time-sounds-magazine-in-1981.html

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  21. There’s nothing less “punk” than a magazine’s list of the top 100 punk songs.

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  22. You mean like I compiled here for this blog a couple of years ago?

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  23. Dave, The Cult are touring this year. Must have known your post was coming and have decided to stay away from NJ/NY area.

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  24. If you don't like the list you could listen to the 100-song playlist after the list.

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  25. Fuck baseball and math you say? How can I subscribe to your newsletter?

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  26. did dave's tweet to david sims cause the latter to see the error of his ways? to seek a restraining order?

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  27. I am just enjoying the title of this post and how Dave accuses someone of getting it wrong while misspelling his name.

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  28. Wait wait wait, you're asking Dave to acknowledge his foibles and possibly even be accountable for them? You should go read his old blog, Sentence of Dave, to gain more insight into his personality.

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  29. taking my little one and some of her friends out to dinner this evening to celebrate her 15th birthday (time, she does fly). she's selected cheesecake factory as our venue. i really feel like i've failed as a parent.

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  30. My 15 year old also likes. Cheesecake Factory. It happens.

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  31. Because you want to go to Friendly’s?

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  32. And Z, I haven’t expected any such thing out of Dave after like 1991. I just marvel and laugh at it.

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  33. that was almost a haiku by whit.

    i am virulently anti-chain, z. because i'm an elitist asshole, according to my wife. because i like supporting local businesses, according to me. truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

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  34. Somewhere in the Middle is a good movie.

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  35. Pour some out for Mona Robinson. Cougar version 1.0.

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  36. how could i spell such a short name wrong?

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  37. where did i misspell it?

    i think you guys need to tweet to him. i don't think my tweeter works. perhaps i'll send him an instagram.

    also, not to brag, but my kids have NEVER eaten at cheesecake factory. appalling.

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  38. i found it! it was like the purloined letter. hiding in plain sight.

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  39. tonight is my son's 15th birthday too. there are five kids sitting across one couch in our basement, playing smash bros and listening to k pop. they are skinny.

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  40. K-pop gives that away. Fat dudes listen to metal.

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  41. “I don’t think my tweeter works.”

    Been there.

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  42. My 17 year old listens some shitty music. Not all of it, but enough. But she doesn’t listen to K pop. You’d be better off with the Cheesecake Factory.

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  43. 20/20 showing the famous murder that happened a couple years ago in the town next to where I grew up. The town was Neptune. It’s the home of Pete and Elda’s, the best thin crust pizza joint in the Dirty Jerz.

    I took Zman there in college. He ate a lot of pizza, acted inappropriately around girls I went to high school with at a local bar, and then barfed in the toilet at that bar.

    It was a great night.

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  44. I was flipping channels and saw a few minutes of that. Then I went back to Blazers-Raptors. That was a hell of a game. He won’t but I’d love to see Kawhi stay in Toronto. That’s an extremely well run organization with a talented roster and an enthusiastic fan base. I think I’m rooting for them to win the East. Nothing against Giannis.

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  45. pete and eldas! we love that place. who got murdered? missed that . . .

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  46. Was crazy Neptune murdering. They dumped the body on the bridge by the Headliner, a terrible, horrible, no good Jersey guido bar.

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  47. I sometimes go low-brow on Instagram. One of the more amusing accounts I have started following is @damnwideneck. The handle pretty much says it all.

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  48. I barfed at Pete and Elda’s before the bar.

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