Boxed wine and Beyond Balderdash.

Last weekend, Amy and I joined a large group of friends for a trip to Spring Mill Inn at Spring Mill State Park in Mitchell, Indiana. The excursion has become a mid-winter tradition these past couple of years — after all, what better way to break up the dreary monotony of wintertime than by heading south (if only just a little) for a weekend of lounging on couches with magazines, eating artery-clogging, country-style food, drinking cheap wine and maybe — just maybe — heading outdoors for a traipse through the park as snow falls silently through the branches of tall, slender trees?

This year, my arrival to Spring Mill was postponed until Saturday morning (I hung around Indy to watch my little brother wrestle ((and, poor kid, lose)) in the high school state tournament on Friday night), but the late start was fine with me. I still managed to check everything off of my to-do list, which, as you might imagine, wasn’t exactly teeming with extra-curricular activities. On Saturday afternoon I finished off this month’s Atlantic (I recommend checking out Michael Hirschorn’s piece on the impending death of decent network TV dramas), took a nice walk through the snow with friends, ate no shortage of junk food (parmesan and garlic potato chips, Goldfish, cheese-flavored popcorn) and, in the evening, drank a Cabernet/Shiraz blend from a box over a game of Beyond Balderdash.

Now Beyond Balderdash has been out of vogue for awhile now (Parker Brothers doesn’t even make it anymore, which means if you want it, expect to pay way more than what’s reasonable), but it is — and has been for more than a decade — my favorite board game in the world. The premise is super-simple: One person chooses a card that has obscure names, dates, intials, movie titles and words on one side. He chooses one, and the rest of the players try to invent a believable one-sentence explanation of either who the person is, what happened on the date, what the initials stand for, what the movie was about or what the word means. Then, the person holding the card reads the faux definitions or explanations, along with the REAL one mixed in, and everyone guesses which one is authentic. You score when somebody chooses your fake definition as real, as well as when you choose the right one.

Easy enough, right? With us, everyone starts out playing it straight, but as the game continues and the wine box empties, things inevitably get  stupud, juvenile and hilarious. Here are some examples of what we wrote, by category:

NAMES

Leopold Trouvelot: “A famous murder defendant, now presumed to have been wrongly-accused in the 1950s, who lost his life to the British death penalty but changed the future of the justice system throughout Europe.”

Mordecai Marducci: “Everyone called him a fit fellow, but when he died it was found he had been sucking in his belly all those years.”

MOVIES

Take Two: “A downhome comedy about an old Mormon couple who kidnap two kids from their neighbor’s yard.”

Big Deal On Madonna Street: “A-Rod eats his way down Madonna to a celebratory conclusion.”

WORDS

Hodad: “The new Tyler Perry movie.”

Looking over these now, the words “you had to be there,” come to mind, and that’s probably true. Here’s what I recommend: if you can locate Beyond Balderdash for less than $50 bucks, snag it, get together with about five or six friends, invest in a box of wine, and let the night take you where it may. The whole state park hotel thing isn’t required for a good time, although it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Consumme 2.17.09

Morrissey Day. The A.V. Club swoons over “Years Of Refusal” by Morrissey, saying the singer “sounds vital, alive, and like he’s finding mid-life as rich in purposeful misery as any othe age.”

Spotless minds? A new study shows how a common blood pressure drug may be developed into a pill that can erase bad memories.

Sugar, sugar. “A sugar daddy arrangement can be a unique, enriching experience between people who understand, and value the meaning of reciprocity.”

Running from camera. “The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.“

Loser Hoosiers. As Indiana’s basketball team hits a record-breaking low, Deadspin’s Rick Chandler disses the program and the city of Bloomington.

Consumme 2.16.09

Rate thy physician. Zagat gets into the doctor rating business. Doctors don’t like it.

Rich people are rude. How our socioeconomic status affects the way we talk to others.

File under “O RLY?” Recent research suggests there could be thousands of intelligent civilizations in the universe.

Don’t be That Guy. You’ll end up in this laugh-out-loud funny photo gallery.

Consumme 2.13.09

Twitter stupidity. Don’t keep your repulsive geekiness to yourself. Share it with the world with a custom T-shirt emblazoned with your favorite Tweet.

Wal-Mart makeover. According to the Washington Post, Wal-Mart is setting the standard for employee health care benefits.

Hard times not always hard. Sexual desire actually may increase during a recession. Unfortunately, when your financial status is compromised, so is your ability to perform. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Consumme 2.12.09

Dead man Joaquin. Well, not dead, exactly, but definitely heavily medicated in this incredibly bizarre Letterman appearance.

Keillor on Updike. Garrison Keillor mourns the passing of John Updike at Salon.com, calling him “the cheerfullest writer in the world.”

Hallmark on truth serum. Cracked.com showcases the 15 winners of a contest in which readers submitted Valentine’s cards that are actually honest. It’s a mixed bag, but worth the click for Number 2.

Consumme 2.11.09

Siriusly? Less than two years after the merging of Sirius and XM, the satellite radio service is on the brink of bankruptcy.

“So-called ‘futurologist.’ “ That’s how the Telegraph refers to Ian Pearson, who says TVs will be contact lenses in 10 years.

Don’t call it “Randism.” A youngish Mike Wallace interviews author Ayn Rand in 1959 (!).

“Amateur hour.” Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker writes about the administration’s first weeks, accusing Obama of crippling immaturity.

New Pepsi logo’s startling origins revealed.

I’ve already Tweeted about it, but I can’t help but add to the web-wide snickering about the leaked presentation that was created by Arnell, the ad agency that designed the underwhelming (to put it kindly) new Pepsi logo.

I first read about the debacle this morning here, and later in the day ran across several online articles clowning Arnell — most notably here and here. (Download the presentation at any of these sites. Seriously. Do it. No, REALLY, do it.)

Now I’ve worked with some advertising folks so full of their own bullshit it was coming out of their ears. But nothing I’ve encountered comes close to comparing to the audacity and clueless, tone-deaf arrogance of the creative team that put this presentation together. Now, to be fair, that’s partly because most of the creative directors I’ve worked with lack the technical skill, knowledge and imagination to aspire to bullshit of this magnitude. The bullshit I’ve witnessed is strictly garden variety stuff: buzzword-studded presentations, insanely unrealistic projections of media interest, stuff like that. But this — this is some truly inspired bullshit.

Pepsi must have thought so, too, because they paid millions of dollars for a derivative, flat and forgettable logo based on this presentation. It’s hard not to wonder what the reactions of those executives will be when they run across the hundreds of  snarky, incredulous, un-uh-no-they-didn’t responses to this presentation that are cropping up everywhere on the web as I type. Oh, they’ll probably rationalize it (when you spend that kind of cash on something, it ain’t easy to accept that you basically got got, as the kids say). More interesting would be the reactions of the Arnell team. Do they really believe in this? And if so, are they an anomaly in the ad business, or is this kind of byzantine, smoke-and-mirrors shit the norm at big-money agencies these days?

Consumme 2.10.09

He’s always on hipsters’ minds. Phosphorescent (a fine folk singer on Dead Oceans out of Bloomington, Ind.) gets good marks from Pitchfork for his album of Willie Nelson covers. Not all critics have been as impressed.

Emancipate yourself from unauthorized merchandising. The Marley Estate has teamed up with a private equity firm to make a push to license Bob Marley’s  “likeness, trademarks and themes for apparel, food and even video games.”

It’s got a bunch more megapixels and what-not. “Sony releases new stupid piece of shit that doesn’t fucking work.”

Consumme 2.5.09

• Slate crowns the “king of all social media.” His name: Andrew Sorcini. He has an uncanny ability to find and post links that appeal to his fellow Digg members. His Digg name: “MrBabyMan.”

• Re-branding the War on Terror. President Obama and his team of national security advisers are brainstorming to come up for a “more precise phrase” to describe the effort to protect America from terrorists.
• Sympathy for Christian Bale. That light tweaker who stepped into his field of vision deserved Bale’s meltdown. Harry at Ain’t It Cool News explains why.

That’s the way you do it: Copy for nothin’ and critics for free.

Over at Popmatters (for whom I’ve written concert reviews, artist interviews and CD reviews), Rob Horning has written a thoughtful column about the very 21st century transactional phenomenon that Popmatters thrives on: writers who’ll give away their work for free in the interest of personal brand-building. Horning cites a recent business week article by Stephen Baker that describes the efforts of entrepreneurs to harness the power of people willing to work for little more than a byline and whatever status comes with a good-sized Google footprint. Baker writes:

“Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others. But how to monetize all that energy? From universities to the computer labs of Internet giants, researchers are working to decode motivations, and to perfect the art of enlisting volunteers”

Maybe even more interesting is Horning’s commentary on an article by David Hadju in the Columbian Journalism Review, in which Hadju laments the “weird and totally unwarranted authority” earned by amateur criticism in the Internet age, calling it “one of the baleful consequences of the democratization of expression by the Web.”

Sounds like sour grapes on the part of an old media stalwart, and Horning argues as much. It would behoove him to do so, seeing how he represents a web site that doesn’t pay its writers. As for me, I quit writing for Popmatters shortly after I got my first paying journalism job, but went back to it about six months ago — not for status or any shifty self-branding agenda, but simply because I really  like writing about music, and figure I might as well publish it in a place where it’ll find a wider audience than here at my low-traffic blog. But when a review of mine does run at Popmatters, you can bet I link to it here. And this makes me think that I — and probably a lot of other Gen X (and Y) writers — have self-branding and self-promotion hardwired into our writerly DNA. We do it not so much because we have designs on success, but because it’s just what one does in the 21st century if he wants to make a living as a media professional. It’s hard out there for a copy hustler. But if Horning’s future-looking final paragragh is at all prescient, that might change as consumers of online copy start shying away from amateur content:

“[A]s more outlets for uncompensated content creation proliferate on the Web—Amazon.com and social networks being the most conspicuous ones right now—the perception that it’s all hobby writing and/or self-branding online will become even more entrenched. Sites may have to go more explicitly capitalist—pay writers, collect subscriptions, feature advertising, etc.—to ensure that they are regarded as “professional” and worthy of being read by people who otherwise limit their consumption of amateur copy to those they have friended.”

Anyone who writes for a living would be lying if he said he didn’t hope this was true. And he would be being equally mendacious (or just plain delusional) if he didn’t admit that he doesn’t think things’ll go down like that.