Brutally honest, detailed and challenging. Without writing an epoch on why The Wire is the greatest television drama ever produced, I offer the previous sentence as my personal take on David Simon’s urban masterpiece. The Wire’s Baltimore had no definitive good guys or bad guys, just police, dealers and civilians all trying to survive in a city decaying around them. The show was never a ratings success (it maybe even classified as a failure in this regard), as the show’s street emphasis and devastatingly bleak portrayal of Baltimore in decline struggled to engage the same HBO audience that made The Soprano’s TV’s most popular drama. The Wire is not however, tragedy after tragedy as many of the shows most memorable scenes are leaps funnier than your sitcom offering. Thus, for anyone struggling with the end of the The Wire or for anyone looking for the reason why people love the show, I have compiled a collection of The Wire’s funniest scenes. (note: this is an HBO show with an HBO vocabulary and HBO content, and these scenes are unedited).
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Entries from March 2008
Way Down in the Hole: The Wire 2002-2008
March 10, 2008 · 2 Comments
Categories: The Wire
Post #101: We haven’t quit yet!!!
March 8, 2008 · No Comments
Well Anthony was the lucky recipient of post #100. But seeing as he was unable to celebrate this achievement, I’m going to give you a limited edition The Bocker 101 post blowout. This of course means that I’m going to post a few youtube videos that I’ve been enjoying recently. Who doesn’t like videos right?
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Categories: Wallace's Thoughts
Tagged: Beach House, Beirut, Big L, Dru Hill, Soccer, The Big Phat Morning Show
White People’s Interests are Totally Awesome!
March 7, 2008 · No Comments
Recently in the “blogosphere”, Stuff White People Like
has become a real must read. Basically, the blog posts daily or so on a different topic that “White People” like. By white people, SWPL means affluent and informed white people. By “stuff”, SWPL means things that THESE white people like only for the sake of achieving a more with-it existence. While I feel like I half see the humor in SWPL and half am annoyed by lameness of a giant hipster-blog inside joke (the actual breakdown is 25% amused, 50% annoyed, 25% Who gives a…), SWPL has inspired me to list some of the things I hate about actual white people. There’s no loathing like self-loathing.
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Categories: Politics
Hill-Dog Riding High On Victory
March 6, 2008 · No Comments
By now you’ve already heard of Hillary Clinton’s big victory on Tuesday with Primary wins in Ohio and Texas. Both of these states were essential for her to remain relevant as a candidate and she was unsurprisingly extatic about her wins. I for one was not very happy about her victory and I wasn’t alone. Hillary Clinton is, in my opinion, not the best candidate for the Democratic party.
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Categories: 2008 Presidential Election · News · Politics
Tagged: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton
Till Retirement Do Us Part
March 6, 2008 · No Comments
So here it is. I figure I have to be the 2,383,973,216 person to blog about Brett Favre retiring, but after much deliberation, I feel it is quite deserving. I can count on my right hand how many current athletes deserve this much media attention, and Brett is undoubtedly one of those fingers. He wouldn’t be the pinky. Brett is just too hard-nosed to be a useless pinky. He sure isn’t the middle finger. because southern boys are just too courteous to ever toss that gesture around. The index and the thumb work together on just too many tasks for Brett to be associated with anybody else. That leaves the ring-finger. 
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Categories: Football
Young Gunnas
March 5, 2008 · 1 Comment
Arsenal’s great 07-08 season has another success as the Gunners put the defending champs, AC Milan, out of this season’s Champions League, with a 2-0 win in Milan. The story here is that unlike their competition in both England and Europe, Arsenal has not acquired a roster of high priced, transferred players, but rather a roster of young, homegrown talent.
Categories: Champions League · Soccer
Tagged: Arsenal, Champions League, Gunners, Soccer
Inner Peace Kills Blogger
March 5, 2008 · No Comments
For the past week, my blogging urges have been cut down significantly. Up until last week, I felt as though I would need the rest of century and next to address all of the issues I wanted to rant and rage on about. Then I opened, Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox, and have too easily accepted Easterbrook’s premise; that the world has in fact, never been better than it is today. And since, its as though I have been neutered of my “soapbox” drive. I have willingly ignored chances to scream about the Jets free agency plans, the drummer from Vampire Weekend being hit by a car in London and the recession in general, simply because Easterbrook has lulled me into believing that the world is great and improving.
Long a favorite of The Bocker due to his epic Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns, Easterbrook penned The Progress Paradox in 2003. The full premise of the book is that though the world has never been better and is constantly improving, people on the whole generally feel as though life is bad and getting worse.
I generally take the opinion that things are never as bad as they seem, but Easterbrook has me convinced that people on the whole have never been wealthier, healthier, more peaceful and more secure than they are today. Furthermore, he similarly presented the reasons to society’s overall pessimistic view on life as materialistic, sensational and fatalistic. That is, we want well beyond our needs, we listen to the loudest voices and we live in fear of losing everything. We also see society’s pasts accomplishments as steps to reaching a current plateau of success, instead of looking at them as inspirational examples that any problem moving forward can be solved.
Fortunately however, I have recently finished this book and like most things read, the main point is remembered but most of the details are forgotten. This hopefully means that while I am currently able to sit back and say, “I live in a time of opulence, freedom and achievement.”, I will soon return to comments like, “The NCAA is a horsesh!t organization”, or “Why the f@ck would anyone call Hilary Clinton at 3 am anyway? No one would drunk dial her ever.”
I hope to keep a few of the real gems from Easterbrook’s work, especially when I hear someone moan and bitch about how envious they are of someone else’s apartment or how unfair life is. Hopefully though, I will be back to my argumentative, cynical and ornery self, but for now I will sit back and think about how lucky I am to not live in a time of serfdom, plague, world war and hard labor. Did you know that blogging is a result of people having enough spare time to comment on the world around as opposed to say, working 14 hours in a factory, 6 days a week, as was a common occupation for the average person 100 years ago?
The uppermost photo is work by graffiti artist, Banksy.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or any other post. Email us at editor@thebocker.com
Categories: Books · Internet
Tagged: Banksy, Gregg Easterbrook, Tuesday Morning Quarterback
Robot Politics
March 4, 2008 · No Comments
Monday is passed and I for one can’t wait for Friday. Monday is always a let down in my opinion, regardless of whether or not you enjoy your job. The fact of the matter is you have to wake up early and get to work and, if you’re doubly unlucky, you have to put on a tie. Anthony will have to verify this for me, but I’m pretty sure most suicides happen on a Monday. People just feel their worst at the beginning of the week. It’s a fact of life. That’s when we here at The Bocker like to take you away from life’s troubles and talk turkey with you. Or in this instance, talk robots. (And just so we’re on the same page, I’m talking about the physical specimens, not that annoying dance white guys seem to like.)
Regardless of whether or not you find robots creepy, the fact of the matter is that robots will be come more and more a part of our daily lives as we enter the future. A recent article on cnn.com talks about the Japanese and their attempts to integrate robots more fully into domestic life. According to the article “over 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan in 2005, about 40 percent of the global total and 32 robots for every 1,000 Japanese manufacturing employees.” (Quote from AP/CNN) With over a fifth of the population 65 and over, the Japanese feel that robots will need to take over more industrial jobs as people retire. And after retirement, they envision robots taking care of the elderly.
I felt the need to put an end to all this robot nonsense. I like to consider myself somewhat of a movie buff. And if the cinema has taught me anything it’s that you can never trust a robot. The examples are endless: I,Robot, The Matrix, Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sky Captain, Transformers (Though in this movie half the robots are good.), A.I. (I never trusted the little kid. His tears were all a cover for something. I’m just not sure what yet.), Judge Dredd, Lost In Space (I’m sure there was an evil robot in there somewhere.), and on, and on, and on. You get the point. Most robots are evil and can’t be trusted. How many times have they used their “logic” to conclude that humans are bad and need to be eradicated? How many times have robots grown tired of manual labor and slavery and risen up to overthrow the planet? I’m with Will Smith on this one, never trust a robot. I mean look at what this robot does to that poor puppy in the video below. Poor little guy never hurt a living soul, but does that robot care? No. Heartless bastard.
I have to apologize for that last paragraph. My only defense is that you had to know I would go with the “Robots will conquer us” angle at some point. I just figured I’d get it out of the way early. One thing I did find troubling in the article is the idea that robots are taking human’s jobs by doing work faster and without the need of vacations or overtime. I understand that this is a price of modernization, but it’s hard enough for people to find work as it is without robots becoming competition as well. Overall, there’s just something about the idea of robots becoming integrated into society that just doesn’t seem natural. In the end though I guess I’m a little excited to see what the future of robots will bring. Especially if they keep working on these “sexy” girl robots. (Wink, Wink. Nudge, Nudge.)
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or any other post. Email us at editor@thebocker.com
Oh Those Diaper Dandies
March 2, 2008 · 1 Comment
Is it just me, or can you feel IT in the air? The feeling you get when you see upsets galore, bubbles burst, and a whole lot of screaming from Dicky V. Now that it is March, the countdown may begin to arguably the most exciting event in sports every year. After a dreadful February of zero football or baseball, the sports world has re-found it’s glory every March in the form of a 64-team all-or-nothing tournament where children are exposed and men are made. Every March we are graced with clips of Christian Laettner’s brilliance and Chris Webber’s stupidity, and every year another clip is added to the timeline of immortality for NCAA athletes. And with David Stern adding a new rule legislating all high-school athletes must be one-year removed from graduating high-school to jump to the NBA, some of the most elite basketball players in the world will be showcased on a national stage come tourney time. 
Last year was dubbed the “Year of the Freshmen”. We had Kevin Durant, Greg Oden, Gerald Henderson, Tywon Lawson, Brandan Wright, and plenty of other true froshes that took college basketball back to the days where legends were made before they hit the NBA. For the first time in years, the best high-school basketball players were forced to play for a college team, effectively bringing more attention to these teams lucky enough to acquire these fine athletes. If that was last year, then what would they call this year? The year of the…..uhhhh….sup…..super freshmen? Last year marked the first time ever a Freshman received the AP Player Of The Year Award when Kevin Durant ran away with the prize, and this year’s award will probably go to another fabolous freshman in Michael Beasley. Don’t get me wrong though; there’s plenty of other freshmen that are just as deserving of the title “super”. Indiana’s Eric Gordon is averaging 21 points and leads a talented Indiana team into the tourney as a sleeper team poised to do damage on opposing higher seeds.
Derrick Rose, projected as a top 5 pick in this year’s upcoming draft, is the speedy point-guard leader behind an extremely talented Memphis team. Already leading Memphis to a near perfect regular season, his game has elevated to a level rarely seen by true freshmen. Able to run the offense in John Capilari’s dribble-drive oriented scheme, Rose has adapted and proved his athleticism can translate to a more serious level come draft time. Granted he has some incredible recruits to help him win games, there will be no difference in the NBA when he is playing at an even faster pace with more talented shooters to balance his style of play.
Then there is O.J. Mayo. Once dubbed the “next” Jordan, or “next” LeBron, he has excelled at the college level well enough to be considered a lottery pick. Now that he is not overwhelmed with the media trying to hype up his ability, Mayo has relaxed in his role in USC and has proved to scouts he isn’t just a highlight reel. While his defense may need tp improve, his solid play still al’ows me to call him “super” in this class of freshmen.
Now I have a personal vendetta against Donte Greene. As a Syracuse fan, waching Donte play is extremely frustrating as he is unable to use his 6″10 frame on the boards and in his post game. Tossing up 10 3’s a game and shooting zero free throws in his last two games is just unacceptable for a person his size and skill. Now regardless of my personal (sigh), mild hatred, for his playing style, most scouts believe he has the ability to translate his game to the NBA level. If he wants to leave school early, he can leave without many missing him. But if he stays, Syracuse has a chance at making another run at the title.
Back to Michael Beasley, he is by far the most talented freshman in the country. Coming in as the number 1 ranked recruit by many sources, he has only exceeded expectations in breaking the Big 12 rebounding record in his first NCAA game, and then breaking the Big 12 points record, once held shortly ago by another fantastic freshman, Kevin Durant. Beasley is poised to be the number 1 overall pick in the upcoming draft, proving that freshmen truly are taking over the game.
As Dicky V would say, these diaper dandies are big P.T.P’ers that can Slam, Bam, Jam AND dish the rock.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or any other post. Email us at editor@thebocker.com
Categories: NCAA Tournament
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