This Time It's War!

So the World Series of Pop Culture has finally begun. When we finished with all the shooting in March, I couldn't even imagine this day even arriving. It was one of those inevitable days that you know will happen but despite your best efforts you can't begin to visualize, like thinking about your first day driving a car when you're ten, or the first day of school next year on your last day of classes, or the day I turn 30 (still not happenin').

Tonight I finally got to see what some teams were doing while Utz, Weber, and I were eating catered food and scaring the other teams by still talking about pop culture for hours in the green room. Apparently they were out there making good, but somewhat uncompelling television. I think maybe, since I was so eager for the show that my expectations were too high. Don't get me wrong, I mean there's little one can do if your match isn't as exciting as it should short of throwing games to make it closer. More power to you if you can kick some ass. Entering the tournament we were shooting to make many hours of uninteresting television in the form of a string of one sided sweep victories for us (you'll have to watch us to see just how boring we might get).

I'm not going to do a detailed recap or anything of the episode, you can check out this nifty little bracket on wiki. It's not an anti-spoiler reason or anything, I'm too tired to remember all the details and I forgot to tape it. Besides, by the time you read this, VH1 will have no doubt played this episode about a dozen times.

I don't want to come off as overly critical about the whole thing, there were definitely some good match ups with a bunch of tiebreakers, but at a high level of play like this, there should never (I repeat) never be 3-0 blow out rounds. And it's not like those categories where impossible, especially "80s Hits", that's a category everyone should be down with...at least one answers' worth. The other was a category about songs about crazy people called "Loony Tunes" that wasn't all that difficult (even my pop culture greenhorn sister knew "Basketcase"). In defense of both the fat guy from Fat Guys in Little Coats and the chick from White Russians, lyrics categories are definitely the trickiest of categories, it's like a magic eye painting you either see it right away or never do (but come on you gotta know "When Does Cry?").

That's basically my two cents on this the critical first day of the tournament. The questions were pretty good, like most at home I was screaming in frustration when people weren't getting the ones I knew and quietly forgetting about the ones I didn't know. Now if you want to see some dynamite pop culturing action* you gotta tune in tonight at 9 (8 central) to see our little pop culture fire engine's push for glory.

We'll be having a little TV party tonight at Weber's pad in Brooklyn. You know where to reach me if you've got nothing better to do.



*dynamite pop culturing action not guaranteed