And Then On Thursday Everything Folded In On Itself . . .

Every couple of weeks we get together with a small group of people for "wine night" in which Jen pick out a selection of wines and I make dinner. Jen calls it the "Humpday Tipples" because we hold it on Wednesday and because we tipple. Part of it is an excuse to try new wines but it also serves a purpose for Jen in that it helps her with her wine studies, which is one of the extracurricular activities she's undertaken as of late. Of course, the other part of it is that we get to get loaded.

So anyways, one of the side benefits of the Humpday Tipple is that while we tipple, we develop brilliant new schemes. Sadly, most of these brilliant new schemes are lost to the ethyl but every once in a while a brilliant new scheme survives into the hazy next day. Which brings us to the latest brilliant new scheme: The Professional Devil's Advocate.

Some of us in the group work in the general field of consulting of one sort or another. Or at least that's sort of what it seems like, since sometimes I don't totally understand what the field of consulting is all about. Anyway, last night somehow we got onto the topic of consultants, or consulting, or whatever it is that the term "consulting" refers to, since like I just said, sometimes I don't totally understand what the field of consulting is about. And anyway, it occurs to us — probably all of us at one time, which is generally the mark of brilliance, or at least drunkenness — that there should totally, totally be Professional Devil's Advocates, because wouldn't be cool for there to be a whole battery of "anti-consultants" whose sole purpose is to pick apart what the original consultants come up with because consultants sometimes seem to be in the habit of telling a client what that organization wants to hear? (I don't get why some act like this is a bad thing.)

It takes only a couple of minutes for everyone to agree that we should go into business as Professional Devil's Advocates. We will start a firm and beat the bushes for clients. We will recruit experts in the field — every field! — to function as team leaders in the business. We will make a living telling clients how their new plans will suck, or that the other consultants have produced a pack of lies designed to circularly confirm what the client has wanted the consultants to tell them. It would have been an awesome idea in 2002! (In fact, someone seems to have suggested this back in 2002.) Slate could have profiled us. We would call ourselves the No Men (as opposed to Yes Men — get it?).

Because really, who doesn't want to sit back and say why things are wrong, or why they will remain wrong, or why nothing someone tries to do will ever be right? You could call it purposelessly contrarian, needlessly reflexive or even anti-American, but deep down you know that it would feel good to do this and actually get paid for it and that really is the American dream.

At some point after everyone agrees that this would indeed be a brilliant new scheme it occurs to me that someone should perhaps play the role of Devil's Advocate for the Devil's Advocate idea and attempt to tease out scheme's deficiencies. I ask whether this already exists in the role of "auditor" and am quickly shouted down that auditors are probably too scientific for what we are proposing and that an auditor's role is just to count shit. OK, fair enough, I'm still game then.

Then it happened — my head felt squishy this morning while I was making the bed and it suddenly occurred to me that Mission of Burma guitarist Roger Miller had a side project in the late 1980s/early 1990s called "No Man." Is it possible that the name was derived from "Yes Man"? The British band No-Man seems to have taken its name from the phrase "No man is an island" (adding parenthetically "Except for the Isle of Man").

I will now insert a link and embedded video of this W.B. Mason ad that played over and over during the 2010 baseball season (back when we had MLB Extra Innings):

Some take exception to W.B. Mason commercials. See here and here, for example. I always found the lady's tone so grating — first she sneers "the dullest reality show I've ever seen" like she's so above watching dull reality shows and then she follows that with that elliptical "or maybe not . . ." phrase that ends the commercial. For a time I felt that there was something especially pernicious about the combination of the disinterested sneer/voyeuristic thrill that the actor expresses in a span of only eight seconds. Like so many mid-week, mid-season baseball games, the commercial — or rather this eight-second clip — made me fatigued, sad and pensive about the way we consume media. No seriously, I swear to God — this W.B. Mason commercial made me sad — over and over and over again during this past baseball season. There's a reason she's reading a big paperback while a newspaper sits splayed out on the comforter in front of her and she's watching television at the same time — all at 3 in the morning, mind you. It hurts my head thinking about how much media this lady consumes, and how schizophrenic she is about both sneering at it and being absolutely compelled to watch it.

You could argue that I am reacting so strongly to this eight-second clip because I recognize this impulse in myself, which would be a fair observation. If true, then it makes me sadder — it's bad enough to see yourself in a W.B. Mason ad and that much worse to have to admit that you should probably take it to heart. Who But W.B.? Who indeed. Who indeed.

But you know what the worst part of that commercial is? The "To be continued . . ." at the end. I hate "To be continued" and the ellipses at the end of "To be continued." And yet . . . and yet I not only still continue to use ellipses — and not the Word auto-corrected dotdotdot but the luxurious dot dot dot — the kind of ellipses that breaks word wraps and makes editors cringe. Those are like heroin to me.

To be continued . . .

Eric Byrnes Continues To Invade My Mental Space

One thing we can thank the current highest-paid beer-league softball player for is playing a key role in rehabilitating The Outfield's "Your Love."

After we attend a wedding and the wedding band pulls out the number at some point in its final set, I want to argue that former Major League Baseball player Eric Byrnes is singlehandedly responsible for this, but Brother Michael vehemently disagrees, and provides the Wikipedia proof. Yes, Michael, maybe Katy Perry did cover the song in 2007, but that was well before "I Kissed a Girl" catapulted her into the mainstream. And sure, the Decemberists have been covering it since 2005, but who is really paying attention to Decemberists covers? I mean, to the extent that we're hearing "Your Love" at a wedding — and not just a DJ's pick, but a song that a five- or six-piece band actually took the effort to learn — I blame Eric Byrnes.

I have to say that I really do like Eric Byrnes. Maybe you want to dislike Eric Byrnes, but it's not Eric Byrnes' fault that the management under Josh Byrnes (no relation) gave him so much money to play softball (think about that, Wilpons!) (Alright, so maybe it wasn't all Josh Byrnes' fault, but it's difficult to resist a gratuitous dig at the Mets' ownership).

There's a long list of loopy stuff Byrnes did during his career that might get tiresome but which in the rigidly conformist world of baseball seemed relatively endearing: Sliding headfirst into bases when there's no play; Flossing and surfing; Mustaches. He even blithely rode his bike through the clubhouse after forgetting to bunt during a suicide squeeze — of course he was released only a few days later; a "free spirit" is a cool thing — until he starts to suck. And after Eric Byrnes started to suck, he quickly became the highest-paid player in the history of beer-league softball.

One of the funnier things about Byrnes was his walk-up music. Circling back to the original point, Byrnes began the 2008 season by using The Outfield's "Your Love" as his walk-up music (though when he hit a slump, his teammates took matters into their own hands). And the clip he used wasn't the four measures of Summer of '69-ish fart guitar that opens the first 30 seconds of the song but rather that distinctive Alan and The Chipmunks-like first line: "Josie's on a vacation far away . . ."

I know, corny — "The Outfield," get it? Probably even cornier than "Disco Inferno," one of Byrne's previous picks: "Burn, baby burn," get it? But in a milieu where stuff like "Crazy Train" and "Big Pimpin'" is the normal fare, Eric Byrnes' walk-up music was kind of funny. (I'll admit that there are some other goofy songs on this list — did the Reds' Ryan Freel really walk up to "Tom's Diner"? Inexplicable! — but over and over it's stuff like "Slow Ride" or "Sweet Child o' Mine" or "Low Rider" . . . and I hope I go my whole life never again having to think about "Machine Head" — thank god Jeff Cirillo has retired.)

It sounds one of those half-baked arguments that I like to double down on — and it is! — but I'm actually curious: Were we hearing "Your Love" at a wedding because Eric Byrnes started playing it as his walk-up music in 2008? As far as I can tell, "Your Love" had no particular big boost in the way that, say, Trio's "Da Da Da" got a reprieve from the cutout bin of musical history from that VW ad. Even seven straight weekends of I Love the 80s marathons couldn't totally explain why a wedding band would choose to include "Your Love" in its set list.

I admit, it could be that it is a purely organic cultural zeitgeist — part Decemberists, part VH1, part aging demographic and part Byrnes — but if success has a thousand fathers, then rehabilitating "Your Love" should probably be pinned to one asshat. If so, then at least that's something for Byrnes' legacy.

The song itself is an odd choice for a wedding. Sure, it's "fun" to "dance" to, but once you take the lyrics into account, it's hard to justify its inclusion, since it seems to be about a creepy ne'er-do-well having an affair with an underage girl (we caught Adventureland the other night on cable, and without giving too much away, I'll report that "Your Love" is used more appropriately). (The wedding band, by the way, was awesome — the drummer was the lead singer, just like Peter Prescott . . . or Phil Collins.)

One thing I didn't realize was that not only were The Outfield baseball fans but they were actually English, as well. I guess it makes sense — English people seem to love to write creepy sexual subtexts into their pop songs. Their bio page is pretty great for the pictures alone. I don't think even East Williamsburg Industrial Business Zone subletters could bring themselves to wear those high-heeled boots lead singer Tony Lewis is showing off in the top photo there (the pair of shoes that figure so prominently and inexplicably in the foreground of the bottom photo, on the other hand, I feel like I've seen on the B62).

I do hope that Byrnes eventually returns as a commentator or something — he's actually fun to root for — when your team isn't paying him $11 million to play softball that is.