So over the course of the past two and a half months, I’ve managed to watch 5 full seasons of The Sopranos. I had never watched it before, but with all the recent press of it finally coming to an end someday soon and tons of friends telling me I’d love it, I finally caved in and have almost caught up to where the new episodes are now.
And I gotta say, after every episode I find that I’m more hungry than I am impressed.
Look, it’s not a bad show. It’s better than most of the crap out there, even. But…it’s just so damn slow. We’re talking actual hour long shows here, thanks to HBO’s no commercial breaks, that tend to sometimes drag and at the end of an episode there may have been one scene that moved the plot along, if we’re lucky. Otherwise it was just another episode where we were stuck listening to Tony bitch and moan in therapy about his mom or watching as his gomba friends wack and kill red shirt characters as they build up this huge plot arc where something cool and exciting might finally happen and then!!!…….it all goes away by a convenient deus ex machina. A character has a stroke or the feds make a bust or Tony has a talking fish dream (I wish I was kidding) and suddenly everything the season spent building up is washed away.
This show must have been freaking mind-numbing as hell to watch in real time. Seriously, I think people tuned in for the first season, realized the show had potential, and then kept watching while telling themselves it was about to blossom and take off just any day now. By the end of a season, they just stare at disbelief as the final episode fades out with a weak as hell cliff hanger, at best, and they wonder what the hell just happened to one of their favorite shows. But those network executives over at HBO were smart, as they made people wait almost a full year for new episodes every time. Of course, by then, people had forgotten all about their disappointment over the previous season and instead could remember nothing but their bright optimism they had in the beginning.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Of course, I feel all of this for a show that not five minutes ago I typed “it’s better than most crap out there.” Plus I still ended up plowing through 63 hours worth of footage in 75 days, so you might think that ultimately says something more than what I’m saying now. But don’t let that fool you.
I just chalk it up to that small sliver of hope I’ve still clinging onto.
Because so help me God if something doesn’t actually fucking happen in season six…..
I’ve never been much of a Mac user in my time, let alone Apple fan. I guess that stems more from the fact that I was never really exposed to most Apple products. Sure, I love my iPods, but I always had a hunch I wasn’t getting the full Apple experience by twirling my finger around in circles and listening to Aerosmith.
But then a few months back, my freebie nose sniffed out a little something that I like to call my new computer:
Oh yeah, baby, that’s a top of the line Macbook Pro you’re looking at. It came with all the bells and whistles; Brand new, Intel Duo processor, 120GB hard drive, 1GB SDRAM, 15.4 inch screen with 1440×900 pixels, DVD reader and burner, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and I think there’s a time travel and teleportation feature that I’ve yet to figure out.
Retail: $1,900ish. My cost: Free.
Well, okay, not actually free. I ended up paying about $250 for it in trial offers seeing as how I had to do 18 of them for a Do It Yourself freebie site (and I actually kept a few of the trial offers since I ended up using their services), but still. I got it at almost a 90% discount. Not too shabby, if I say so myself.
But the point of this post isn’t to brag (well, okay, it is just a little), but to share my opinion on the Macbook itself. Like I said, I’ve been a Windows user my entire life, but after hearing about how “easy” the Macs were and how simple they made computing, I figured I had to give it a shot. Plus, I’ve gotten into video editing lately and I needed a computer that could handle running a bunch of heavy software at once. My desktop, God bless her, is still crawling around with 256MB of RAM and a 2001 era video card. So when I got the Macbook on my doorstep one afternoon, the decision to open her up instead of sticking her on E-Bay was practically already made.
I already knew about most of the common stumbling points that Windows users first encounter, like the extinction of a right click button on Macs. But man, that still didn’t help with navigating around. It took me a few days to figure out that hitting the “X” button didn’t actually close a program or that the top Apple bar on the screen chameleons into whatever nav bar is needed depending on what program you’re using. (For instance, if I’m surfing in Firefox, it’ll show all the Firefox options like “File”, “Bookmarks”, “Tool”, and the such but then when I switch to iTunes, it automatically shifts to the iTunes options, like “Edit”, “Controls”, “Store”, etc.) Kinda nifty actually.
And then the real fun began.
Before I knew it, I picked up on a few of the important keystrokes and was using the mousepad less and less. With Windows, it’s virtually impossible to navigate around easily without a mouse, but not so with the Macs. When I downloaded programs off the ‘net, I quickly realized that all I had to do in order to install them was doubleclick the downloaded file and then drag the new icon into the Applications folder. That’s it! No clicking “Next” a million times and accepting agreements and waiting as the program loads itself. With a Mac, programs are installed in seconds, not minutes.
In fact, it didn’t take long for me to see why people said Macs were “easy.” With Windows, I tweak the hell out of it. I recently reformatted my other laptop (the one I got for free last summer, no less!) and I spent a good two or three hours tweaking all the settings and features from the basic installation. But with Macs, you can’t tweak them! They essentially come out of the box tweaked for you, without any bloated software or goofy settings and within seconds from hitting the power button (There’s another thing, Macs take no more than 10 seconds to boot up!), you’re using the computer as if you’d had it for years. In fact, Macs aren’t idiot proofed. If you want to delete something, it deletes it instead of asking you a million times if you’re really, really, totally, absolutely sure you want to.
I freaking love it.
And as if this cake needed any more icing, the iLife programs are actually a fucking Godsend. I plug in my digital camera and click iPhoto and the program boots up, detects my camera, and imports the photos in a matter of seconds. I can edit the heck out of them and export them either back to my camera, onto my hard drive, or into iMovie, iWeb, or Christ knows whatever i-program my Mac has. In fact, I think I saw iChrist in my Applications folder a while back.
So does this mean that I’m officially and exclusively a Mac user now? Na. Windows still has its own positives, like being compatible with far more programs and software out there. Plus when it comes time to replace my Macbook in a few years, it’ll be hard to drop two grand on a new computer when I can basically get the same specs on a Windows laptop for a fraction of the cost. No, instead, I’ll just happily own computers with both platforms, trying to figure out how to type on three keyboards at the same time.
The next time Microsoft decides to film another round of these commercials, they need to call me up.
There’s not many times my breath has truly been stolen away from me. We’re talking maybe five times in my entire life and that one time I fell from the monkey bars as a kid and had the wind knocked out of me doesn’t count. But this past week, when I strolled up to the Coliseum in Rome, Italy added a tick mark to the tally.
United recently added a direct route from D.C. to Rome and after a little persuasion on my part, my mom picked up a trip to work the flight and we headed over…for a day. It’s funny when I tell people this, because no matter how many times I explain it to them, they still can’t seem to grasp that I fly all around the world for a grand total of one day, if even that. You almost spend more time on the plane (17 hours round trip to Rome) than you do at the destination (a hair over 27 hours). But trust me, there’s no better way to see a city then to simply hit the ground running full speed for just a short period of time.
We landed around 8:30AM local time and the first thing that grabbed my attention was how easy it was to clear customs. Two jumbo jets had landed at the same time and yet all of us were through customs in about 15 minutes, whereas had we all been in Sydney, it would have taken closer to an hour and a half. The “inspection” involved A) Asking if we had anything to declare and then B) Looking at our passport. Not scanning it. Not making sure it was even a real passport. All I had to do was walk past the agent and flash him my passport. He probably saw it for a grand total of one second.
I loved it.
It was also my first inclination that maybe this old Europe and Italians video might contain more truth than I first suspected.
I decided to take the train into the city on my own since I love trying to navigate my way around new places. If you thought most guys hate asking for directions, then you’ll really feel sorry for my future wife. I find it funny that people get so nervous when they don’t know where to go or think they’re lost. With me, it’s the exact opposite. I know in the end I’ll wind up in the right place and once I finally get there, there’s no other feeling of accomplishment quite like it. So why not just hunker down and figure it out for your damn self?
On the ride into the city, I sat in a room with six other people. The man across from me was clearly Italian, as were most of the other folks riding with us. However, when it came time for him to ask if he had gotten on the right train, he glanced at everybody in a clear effort to see who might best look like a local before settling on me and blurting a long string of sounds I can only guess to be Italian or noise dolphins use to communicate. I’m still not sure which it was.
I really don’t get it. In Argentina, cab drivers would eye my mom and Jeff before looking at me and asking in Spanish how I got stuck with the Americans. The same thing happened in Australia, Germany, and basically everywhere else I’ve ever been. Locals will just start talking to me, asking for directions or if I know the time or whatever and then they stare at me in amazement when I respond with, “Uhhh…yeah, I got no idea what you just said, pal.” And again, here I was in Italy, being mistaken for a local, all the while having no idea what exactly made me look like I fit in more than any of the other yahoos around me. It’s a phenomenon I’ve yet to figure out, albeit one I’m not too keen on trying to correct. Let’s just say it comes in handy from time to time.
After making my way to the hotel, hooking up with my mom, and sneaking into the hotel room to drop off my bags (Italian law requires all hotel guests to drop off their passport at the front desk and pay a fee to stay there…yeah, like that was actually gonna happen), it was close to 10:00. We grabbed our cameras, a few bottles of water, and we were off. We stopped at a little cafe for some Iced Coffee, which I think I enjoyed way more than my mom did. Apparently ice cubes and the strongest pure coffee you’ve ever let flow past your lips is an acquired taste I somehow ended up with. She, however, made a great call by buying two tickets for a tour bus company where they have 12 stops or so throughout the city and run umpteen buses, so that you can basically get off at any stop, stay for as long as you want, and then hop on the next one that passes through.
Of course, when my mom left it up to me to pick our first destination, it took all of 3 nanoseconds for me to say “The Coliseum.”
There aren’t many items in the world that are of “historical” significance that I actually give a rat’s ass about. I mean, seeing the Declaration of Independence was cool and all, but my initial thought upon setting eyes on it wasn’t about how old or important the document was, but of how the room smelled. To me, something that’s only a few hundred years old isn’t that big of a deal. There are trees out there older than that and you don’t see me gawking at them.
But the Coliseum…man. I kinda just stared at it for a while before finally moving to head inside. To say it’s old and has withstood the test of time is like saying I’m devilishly handsome. It’s just an understood given that doesn’t even need to be talked about.
Once inside, I took what amounted to forty-eight million photos. I was rattling off the story behind everything I saw to my mom (hey, that’s the first time my History degree’s come in handy!) before I think I finally talked even her ears off. I can’t even put into words what it felt like to stand in the middle of a structure that’s been around longer than the legacy of Christ. You can have your Eiffle Tower, your Statue of Liberty, and your Taj Mahal. I’ll take my Pyramids of Giza, my Tombs of Petra, my Acropolis. And my Coliseum, no doubt.
We tried to squeeze in the Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, but realized we weren’t gonna have much time to see the castle I wanted to check out next if we stayed there too long. Some people might scoff at the thought of skipping over the Vatican for a castle. But giant, old fortresses beat churches in my book any day of the week. No surprise there, really.
I will say this though. The inside of the Basilica itself was like one giant color buffet. You could spend three weeks inside of there and I still don’t think your eyes would have adjusted to the vividness of it all. Everything – the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything looked like a million dollars. You’d glance down at the floor and not help but wonder how much the one small foot of black marble you were standing on cost. It was quite an experience to say the least.
Anyway, after catching one of the last buses to the castle, we ended up taking our time hiking all the way to the top (for which my mom complained after every 10th set of stairs we took ) while taking in all the art that’s littered throughout the building. Massive portraits painted by Rafael himself adorn the walls as if they were nothing more than a window shade. It was almost as if there was so much history in the place, they didn’t know what to do with it all. After a while though, we finally reaching the peak of the fortress and could see over the entire city.
I’ve always had a thing both for skyline views and castles. I love looking out over a city sprawl just to try and swallow how massive the area actually is and I love walking through old castles trying to recreate in my head what it must have been like for soldiers way back when. But to combine the two…well, I can’t say I’ve ever done that before. Though trying to get a photo of us up there was a bit hard, what with my mom trying to communicate in English and probably offensive sign language what we wanted and me trying to explain that we’re actually mother and son, not boyfriend and girlfriend. After a few photographed thumbs and one what I believe to be an zoomed in show of my nose, we got a pretty good picture.
Not long after that, we were back on a bus headed for our hotel. It was actually just fun riding around on the open aired bus, as the weather could not have been any more gorgeous. We’re talking sunny, 70 degrees, light breeze here. In fact, my mom’s been back since and happily reported that on her second trip, her and a bunch of other flight attendants just bought a few bottles of wine, crackers, and cheese and then rode around on a single bus all day long. You get to see some pretty funny things while riding around, like businessmen in suits flying past you on what looks like a hyped up Moped. Or how there are so many fountains and statues around the city, you stop noticing them after only a few minutes. Or even how there might be two painted lanes on the road, six actual lanes of cars, and yet not a single wreck let alone fender bender in sight. I tell ya, if you were to airdrop a bunch of Americans and their SUVs in the middle of Rome, they’d survive for a maximum of 14 minutes.
Before long, we were standing outside the hotel and since our last decent meal had been two giant Starbucks coffees back stateside, we figured it was time to eat. Almost three hours, two real pizzas, and a few dozen Peronas (they taste even better than their similar sounding, Mexican counterpart) later, we were back in the hotel ready for bed. Well, actually I was ready for bed, but my mom was keen on watching Italian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which apparently takes a break after every three or four questions so that, and I shit you not, the host can appear in an infomercial that I suspect is used to help raise the prize money.
See? These are the kind of things you need to travel for.
One night’s sleep and a Business class seat later, I was back in Virginia teaching a bunch of 3rd graders the differences between topsoil and clay. Hell, had I not made this post, you and even the people I work with would have never even known I’d gone.
