What's Mario's Favorite Fabric?

I am standing here in wet jeans, again. I can't sit, of course. So I'm literally standing and writing a blog post. This is probably because of the Internet.

And now's the time when I backtrack and tell you what's going on. And then I'll wrap it up by making reference to what I started with. This is a literary technique that I would look up if I wanted to. This has to be short, though, or my back will start to hurt.

Here's where it started. Our local hardware/western wear/housewares store recently had it's charmingly misspelled "Krazy Daze." This is a period of time so out of it's ever-loving mind that they are practically giving away such things as truck winches, pressure cookers, and propane stoves. You can absolutely not pass up on these deals, people. This is because for a few daze of the year they are crazy with a freaking K.

One of the hot deals this year were shrink-to-fit 501's. I've always been a little fascinated with the 501 mystique. Well, at least as soon as I realized that my legs were much too sexy to be buried under baggy stovepipe legs. This is the first time I'd come across this shrink to fit stuff, though, and I should have been a little intimidated, but I rushed into it like a cat into a paper bag.

At the store they tell you to get jeans that are two inches too big in the waist and one in the inseam. Then you wash the jeans and they end up at your size. Easy enough, I say. I can handle this.

When I got home, though, and started poking around on the web that is world-wide, I found that oh no, there is much more to this shrink to fit thing. Here's something new you might not have known about our modern world. No matter what the issue, someone is obsessed with it.

Bronies. They are totally a thing.

But Matt, you say in your head hours or days after I've written this and therefore I cannot answer you, what does this have to do with wet jeans?

I give you exhibit A:

You know the coolest thing about this guy? Totally blowing off the hottie with the laundry. Also, those boots.

Oh wait, I think. This is something I can totally take way more seriously than anybody should take anything in real life. Thank heavens. I think.

But what's this? In the diagram it says to get, like that famous ring of wherever those movies are from, your one true size. This is from the official Levi's website, mind you. But, but, I say. But I got jeans that were TOO BIG.

I look around some more, and there are folks who prescribe still to the two inches of waist and one inch of inseam. But they get a little krazier.

Here's what you do with your shrink to fit 501's, as paraphrased from the Internet. Buy the jeans and wear them, cuffs folded, for months. You do not wash these jeans, EVER. I mean, ever. Except when you do, which is with Dr. Bronner's 18 in 1 hemp soap ("Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, instantly 6 billion strong & we're All-One. 'Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!'"). Seriously. Read the label on this stuff. But only wash them once every few months. Or at most every two years. Or wash them in vinegar. OR, my personal favorite, put them in the freezer.

Two things. One: You people know that freezers don't kill germs, right? They just make them dormant. Two: Mitey Bites?

Then you will put on the jeans, and soak in the hottest water you can stand. Or you swim in a river in them and then go biking. These jeans will then be the best you've ever owned, like they were custom made for you. The equivalent of $500 dollar jeans that you scored for a much tidier sum while the daze was kraz-eh. You will, and I am not making this part up, "...live in Iowa and wear them as a farmer or to the hottest club in KC or Minneapolis or Omaha or once in a while Chicago. Cruisin’ in STFs, what is hotter."

The hottest clubs in Omaha don't just let you in wearing stupid jeans, right?

Yeah, that's what I thought, too. I figure I am going to do this up right. But I'm a scientist (this is debatable), and I have watched more than one episode of Mythbusters. And I have more money to spend on being vain. So it's back to the ol' store for another pair of jeans, these ones just my size from the get-go.

And there I am, now owning two pairs of jeans that could potentially get me into the hottest clubs in KC or Minneapolis or Omaha, they just need a little bit of work. First of all, though, I figure water's water. So instead of soaking the first pair (the big ones) in the tub, I run them on the "hand-wash" setting in the washing machine. Then let them spin out and put them on damp. Then we watch a few episodes of Downton Abbey as I sit on a towel on the couch like an incontinent puppy. When I go upstairs to get ice cream, though, I notice a problem. The jeans, while nicely shrunken, had baggy knees. I'd been sitting down, which caused the denim to stretch out and make pouches below each knee. This was SUPER DUMB.

I have to admit that I was a bit soured on the whole deal by this point. I'd been wearing both pairs of jeans a lot, and liked them a lot, even the ones that were a little too big. Now that they seemed to fit OK, they had this ridiculous bulges under each knee. In a desperate attempt, I ironed them a lot, with a ton of steam. Crisis averted! Whew.

So I like this set alright. Kristin says they look good, but are kind of saggy in the posterior. Not perfect, and hopefully they're not done shrinking, but not too bad. I felt good enough about them to wear them out to dinner on Ogden's Historic 25th street while someone filmed an actual made-for-tv movie starring TORI FREAKING SPELLING and TIA FROM SISTER SISTER. I wouldn't be caught in them while clubbing in Omaha, though. So tonight it was the smaller jeans while obeying the letter of the Levi law as told in clever cartoons.

The movie? An ABC Family flick called The Mistle-Tones. I saw these two, and was briefly excited

but then I remembered that it's Tori Spelling and Tia from Sister, Sister

Bathtub, hippy soap, hanging, then wearing. This leaves me now standing (so as not to stretch out the knees), while typing a blog in the best-fitting jeans I've ever worn, damp or otherwise. I can barely finish this because Kristin can literally not take her hands off of me. (Full disclosure, she's actually in the kitchen making a grocery list).

I just need a Bedazzler and I'm ready to go.

Occupying Qualcomm

Already I'm slacking a bit on my media reporting duties. Nice. I haven't finished any books recently because I've been playing more video games in the evenings. Don't worry, though, I haven't finished any video games either. So I won't talk about them, either.

We've seen a couple of movies, but I'm going to put a pin in those for now because I've other things to talk about. Just know that in the near future I will be talking about The Cove and Crazy, Stupid Love. So look forward to that.

For now I'm going to talk about October 10, 2011, also known as the day when three generations of Howards finally made it out to a Raiders game. When we got home I told Ethan to write about it in his journal so he'd remember it better, because for us it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing and I don't want to blow those kind of experiences on stuff he won't remember. Hopefully he did, I'll go read his journal to make sure now that he's asleep.

Then I realized that if I didn't write about it, maybe I'D forget some of it. So I'm going to put down some things that happened while they're still fresh.

It's a little bittersweet looking back at Week 10 given the way the season turned out for our Raiders, but as a moment captured in time, without context, it almost couldn't have gone any better.

Picture a sunny day in July. The NFL lockout had just ended and my dad and I pull the trigger on some tickets to the Chargers-Raiders game. On the computer screen the seats look a million miles away. I have no idea if we got a good deal on them, but there they were. Printed out. NFL tickets. This is just after we find out that the Raiders have been more or less gutted during free agencies. No Nnamdi, no Zach Miller, new head coach. "This is going to be ugly," I say. The sentiment is the same for the next two-and-a-half months. It's just the experience. We'll probably lose, but it will be fun to see the Silver and Black in person. Even if they lose.

We're lying to ourselves.

The year goes on and it starts to look good. Really good, actually. Our running back Darren McFadden is tearing holes in teams, he looks like he's the best runner in the NFL. Jeez, they beat the Jets. Al Davis dies, and the Raiders beat the Texans. Not the torn-up Texans that still managed to almost make it to the Super Bowl, but the straight-up Matt Schaub Texans. And suddenly it looks like we're going to see a team with a real shot.

Next week QB Jason Campbell's out and we end up having a punter throwing the touchdown passes. McFadden's out, too. We lose to the Chiefs 28-0. Then Tebow tears us apart 38-24. And my dad, my sister, my son and I muster whatever enthusiasm we can to see what Phillip Rivers and company will do to our team. "This is going to be ugly," I say to myself, knowing that later this could be used in a blog post for dramatic effect.

This picture is going to get my blog a zillion views.

On the flight there are a couple of Chargers jerseys, and a few Raiders jerseys, too. Right near us there's a couple decked out from head to toe in Silver and Black. Here we first find out about the "Coliseum South." See, the Raiders home stadium is the Coliseum. But when the Raiders play the Chargers in San Diego, many San Diego fans flee. Apparently, Raiders fans can be a little scary. So the local fans sell their tickets online - to Raiders fans, obviously - and do something else with their day. Like there's anything else to do in San Diego. I mean come on.

At the airport there are Raiders jerseys everywhere. A security guard remarks that they're being overtaken. I see an "Occupy Qualcomm Stadium" sign. This joke was relevant then.

This trend continues at the hotel. Silver and Black everywhere. My fears of being surrounded by angry Chargers fans starts to dissipate. Not that I was scared. I mean, their colors are yellow and powder blue. Powder blue.

We have arrived. We're wearing our colors. We've eaten. And it's game time.

Read up soon to find out what happened then! Or go on ESPN and look it up. I don't care.

If somehow I'd never heard it, and you gave me a copy of The Cure's Disintegration today and said, "this album affected me profoundly, and even now there's nothing I'd rather listen to if there were just one left on Earth," I'd look at the guy on the cover, say "Is that lipstick?" and then shake my head.

I'd listen to it, sure. Maybe all of the way through, at least once. I'm not sure what it would do to me, though. Listening to it right now it's impossible to separate it from what comes along with it, which is to say every second of every day of years 16-18. What I'm saying is that I understand that the record itself might not mean anything to you, there's probably one that does. And as it plays, I have to admit to myself that yeah, at 32, with so much more experience and a wife and a family, it really is the best. Freaking. Album. Ever.

As I think back, there are probably other CDs I've listened to more. Add it Up, by Violent Femmes, maybe. I can still recite that entire album from start to finish without playing it. Oingo Boingo's Boingo Alive is up there. The self-titled Rage Against the Machine. The Wall. Nothing, though, takes me back to specific moments of my mixed-up teenage years like Disintegration.

I listened to it in the projection booth at the Newgate Movies 4, for example, as I closed up. Cleaning the projectors, covering the film on those massive platters with the big cloth, turning off all the lights in each of the theaters. Driving home at one a.m. on a school night, nobody on the road, "Fascination Street" playing on home stereo speakers spliced into a car stereo that sits loose between the two front seats.

Most of my friends hated my whole 80's catalog (a decade too late), so much of my listenings took place on my own, which is the best way to listen to Disintegration. There's just too much sound going on at once for it to be background sound to a car full of noisy kids who think it's a good idea to shoot plastic disks at passing cars from their parents' minivan with the easily remembered vanity plate. It's for long drives home from dates that you're not sure if they turned out or not, and if they did, is that a good thing? Because if you had fun, it just means you like her more, and as a teenager liking a girl a lot never turned out all that hot.

The clashing, clanging intro "Plainsong" is for playing too loudly in your headphones on that massive discman as you ride in the too-small backseat to your last Scout Camp. Where you'll find out that while you're too old for the knots and the white kids dressed like Native Americans, you will take a backpacking trip and subsequent 200-foot rappel down a rock face that will foreshadow the pursuits of your (so far) adult life.

"The Same Deep Water as You" lasts for nine minutes and nineteen seconds, but feels like an hour. Somehow in a good way. It's the track where at some point you forget that you were listening to anything, and you find yourself in the middle of thinking about something you've never considered before. The soundtrack for a brain that, while being absorbed almost completely with growth and chemistry flowing throughout, is still capable of profound insights that will stick with you forever. Even as you remind yourself constantly how stupid you were the rest of the time.

Also, you will see The Cure live at 17 with your friend. And a gay guy and a cute girl. You'll find out later that they both had crushes on you.

And then there's the tracks that give Robert Smith his reputation for depressing breakup songs. "Pictures of You" with its line "If only I'd thought of the right words, I could have held on to your heart." And the title track, Disintegration, the perfect song for the kid who fell in love with every girl only to talk himself out of it the time she doesn't say hi back in the hall.

So it's all come back round to breaking apart again

Breaking apart like I'm made up of glass again

Making it up behind my back again

Holding my breath for the fear of sleep again

Holding it up behind my head again

Cut in deep to the heart of the bone again

Round and round and round and it's coming apart again over and over and over

Now that I know that I'm breaking to pieces I'll pull out my heart and I'll feed it to anyone

...It's easier for me to get closer to heaven than ever feel whole again

And even then you know it's too dramatic. You're aware that you have to have a girlfriend first to break up and then wallow in a good breakup song. And to get a girlfriend you're going to have to somehow get past the point where your mom has to offer to pay for it before you ask someone to the Homecoming Dance. And even then someone else is going to ask her for you.

But you do understand that part about not feeling whole, because you're not. Not when you're 16 or 17 or 18.

And yet later on in that timeline, at 21, you'll listen to the album in another dark movie theater with your future wife. She'll tell you years later that she fell in love with you to The Cure. She'll fall asleep with her head on your chest as you listen to it eleven years later and you figure that if music helps make you who you are, and this one helped make you someone that a woman like her would love, at some point you're going to have to call it your favorite ever. Even with that lipstick.

I know, two blogs in two days. Don't let that distract you from yesterday's, because it's only just a little below my normal quality. Not a lot. This one is long and doesn't have a lot of pictures, I'm afraid.

So I finished another book. This one is The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. The majority of the book deals with a handful of families in the antebellum South. I looked up antebellum, by the way, just now. It means "before war." My guess was "before bellum," which shows what I know.

I did a Google Image search to see what "antebellum" brings up and there's pictures of some country band and I'm like what the crap is this? Eventually there's a house.

Anyway, in The Known World there are freed black slaves who own slaves of their own. And there are others who are just free and trying to get by. And there are whites around who range from noble to awful, but I'll give away one little spoiler: most of them are awful.

The thing about this book, I think, that you're going to love or hate is the narrative style. I think the closest approximation would be listening to someone tell a story, but a good storyteller, you know? They can be distracted into long tangents, and they do that thing that older folks do where they remind you who everyone is again and again. Often a character is introduced, and the reader is told right there how old he or she will live and a quick synopsis of their life.

Actually, you might not love or hate it, it's certainly plausible that you're like, "I liked that book and neither loved nor hated the narrative style." That's totally an option I will buy into. What I will not abide, however, is your not loving the characters. And I don't mean that you love them like, "Man that's a great person," because there aren't a lot of those (though the good ones are VERY good.) I mean that they'll be fully fleshed out human beings in your mind. They are good characters.

Last year I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, because it was on everybody's list. And I've got to be honest, I freakin' hated it. It took me a while to realize why, other than almost every character was detestable and it was too long, but The Known World helped me figure it out. In Freedom everything that the author wants you to think and feel is said outright by a character, or is there in the internal dialogue. The book requires you to do nothing, because it's just right there for you. And I way agreed with a ton of it! Still bugged me.

I guess I like to have things alluded to and I figure them out, like in a Hemingway short story. Or a video game. Give us some credit, author. Your point will come across much better if you lead me to it, rather than just lay it on me like a dead squirrel.

More like "Bore"dom, amirite?

The Known World gives you some credit. It means you might have to stop and reread a passage, because what's happening is coming a little obliquely, but it's right there for you, because you're smart. At least I am. Man, I am super smart.

Well, as past blogs have shown, I am nothing if not not current with my media reviews, so I figured I'll stick to that pattern as I discuss my most recent adventures in the adventures of others.

I'll start with Hanna, starring Cate Blanchett's legs.

I have to admit. Outside of the Olive Garden, I love women in ties.

Hanna, in case you've already watched some movies from 2011, is about a young girl who has trained her whole life to be an awesome super-spy, aside from the being able act like a normal human being part. I assume that can't really be trained when it's just you and your dad in a remote cabin in Finland. She's being hunted by the aforementioned Blanchett's legs, which are attached to a very steely and just a little unhinged Blanchett.

She's only kinda scary, though, and is nothing compared to Tom Hollander's jumpsuit-wearing euro trash Isaacs.

Look at the shoes. Aren't you unnerved?

Dude's creepy.

Anyway, I liked Hanna. I was surprised to learn that it was directed by the same guy who did the Kiera Knightley Pride and Prejudice, which is a favorite in our household. Which led me to put two-and-two together on this Tom Hollander fellow. Turns out he played the ridiculous Mr. Collins, the vicar who tries to marry Liz Beckett and eventually marries a zombie.

"You might not have realized this, Ms. Bennett, but your collarbone looks like a child's drawing of a seagull."

One of the most compelling things about the movie, to me, is the fighting style they have young Hanna use. It was developed by a guy who studied under Bruce Lee and was specifically tailored based on the girl's small size. Saoirse "Don't-Ask-Me-How-To-Pronounce-It" Ronan trained for 4 hours a day for two months to get it down. I like that kind of commitment. I also liked Cate Blanchett's shoes.

Whew, three pictures for one movie. And I've got two to go.

We also watched Moneyball. It definitely appealed to my economist side. I love that contrarian side of things where you find out that one little statistic makes all the difference in the world. In books like Freakonomics you find out that there's a correlation between how many sprinkles are on the cupcake you eat at 10:30 and the frequency of traffic accidents on the road you work on (this might be a made-up example) and in Moneyball you find out that the only statistic that matters in baseball is how often your players get on base. I learned that baseball can be interesting when it's in movies. Also, Brad Pitt is getting old.

Oh, and last night I took Ethan and Joanna to the Muppets while Kristin took Ginny to see Beauty and the Beast in 3 dimensions. We were stuck with the two dopey dimensions. Unless you count sheer, nostalgic joy, in which case we had something like 5. Are we still talking about dimensions? I got confused there for a bit, but my 15-year-old niece did say as recently as this year that she heard that 4-d movies were coming out soon. That was charming. And no, Spy Kids, smell is not a dimension.

Anyway, Muppets was a delight. I realized that I must have watched the original show more than I thought, because there was some deep nostalgia in there that got tweaked pretty hard, I have to admit. And when I say that I mean that I almost cried. And when I say that I mean that I DID cry. So good job, The Muppets. Joanna cried, too, but it was because of the giant images on the screen and the loud noise. I think she spent the bulk of the movie hiding under my sweatshirt. So good job, The Muppets.

A Treatise on "Scenes."

So I'm on the record for not having resolutions. I haven't made them for the past maybe 5 years or so, and I feel like I'm pretty much on the same general path of progress as when I would make a list and not do much about it. That being said, I have sort of declared 2012 as the year that I become more well-read. Essentially that means that I don't read anything that I don't believe will change my life for the better. No empty calories, essentially.

That doesn't mean I won't read detective books, it just means that I'll only read authors that I feel have something to say beyond just spinning a crackerjack yarn. It's a small distinction, and it's going to be personal, but there you have it.

Totally on my list.

My general guide in this journey is to adhere somewhat loosely to Esquire's 75 Books Every Man Should Read. I like this list because it covers a broad spectrum of time, places, and subjects. Also, it's not 100 books, so that's nice.

Diving into the world of relatively contemporary fiction has its pitfalls, obviously, and I'm not surprised why so many people I know tend to hang around in the juvenile fiction section of the book store. Fiction meant for adults has a lot of, uh, adult situations. These are not, unfortunately, the kinds that Hobbes suggests when Calvin asks him what this means:

Calvin: The TV listings say this movie has “adult situations.” What are “adult situations?”

Hobbes: Probably things like going to work, paying bills and taxes, taking responsibilities…

Calvin: Wow. They don’t kid around when they say “for mature audiences.”

Hobbes: I’ve never understood how these movies make any money.

If only, am I right? Instead, a lot of these books have scenes. As in, "It's a really good book, with a great message and it really makes you think. There's a scene, though, so I don't know if I can recommend it."

I've just finished two very good books, but they've got scenes. So keep that in mind. I don't want to get into a situation I found myself in as a teenager when I used to write for the teen section of the Standard Examiner. See, I recommended Heathers to my fellow teens as a good satire on high school life. I forgot, though, to point out that it is an accurate portrayal of how some people speak and act in high school, which is to say R-rated. I heard a few weeks later that some family members had picked it up at the video store on a whim at my recommendation and were, um, concerned.

Don't.

Plainsong, by Kent Haruf, is one of the most satisfying books I've ever read. There's a stream throughout of inspiring human kindness and humanity that even two days later gets me a little choked up thinking about. It made me want to take Kristin to breakfast the next morning, get chicken fried steak, and buy her the equivalent of a great crib. Um, you'd understand the reference if you'd read it. There's also manliness, justice, and good people facing an unforgiving world. The prose is that spare kind of Cormac McCarthy/William Faulkner thing where there aren't any quotation marks and the sentences go on forever. Yeah, like the plains that Haruf writes about. The metaphor is not lost on me.

So vast. Right? WE GET IT.

Anyway. There are scenes. Most of them are, I guess, PG-13. One isn't, though, and for my conscience to be clear I recommend that if you're iffy on the sex stuff, you just skip pages 52-57. They are kinda important for the story, as they set up a revelation later, but it's alluded to well enough that if you know you're not up to it, you'll get by just fine. Otherwise, my goodness, Plainsong.

My guess, though, is that you want to avoid the Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation.

Apparently one of my favorite jokes is to put up something that I'm NOT talking about and say, "Not this." This song does rule, though.

Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore is very different. Where Haruf employs a modern style to tell an old-fashioned story, Murakami writes in a very traditional way - or at least is translated that way - but his subject matter is often straight bonkers. In this case the two major characters are a 15-year-old boy with a PHD's grasp of philosophy as he runs away from home and a mentally handicapped old man who talks to and rescues lost cats. I've read one other book by Murakami and I loved it until about the last fourth where it just got too weird for me. This one tends towards that, but wraps up in a very satisfying way.

This is the kind of book where characters will discuss profound things in a way that seems completely normal. They reference art and music pieces in a way that makes them seem encyclopedic, but at the time it seems fine. It's a story where a character dressed as Colonel Sanders finds a guy a prostitute, and you're like, "OK."

Oh, and this one? Not for kids.

Yes, I am definitely alright with this.

Anyway, that's that. I have a pile of books waiting to be read, and not surprisingly, while I'm writing these things they don't get read. So I'll get back to that.

2012, The Year of Consumption

I don't mean tuberculosis, by the way, which I've just learned was what "consumption" was. Can you think of a worse name for a disease? Oh, I just did. It's scurvy.

Anyway, instead of wasting your time with my year-end media inventories, I'm going to instead give a running commentary on the things I'm getting into these days, media-wise, as I get into them. (This will also waste your time, just more regularly.) That way I'm not missing out on any gems (or pieces of crap), and therefore you aren't either.

As I start to write this, I'm forced to consider the possibility that the only person interested in the particular mix of interests I have is me, and that as much as it delights me to read my own writing, it might not justify an actual blog. Luckily nobody reads this besides me anyway, so I hope you love it, Matt. Also, why are you spending all of your time with other people's creations and not making your own?

Hmm.

We just watched Midnight in Paris, which is Woody Allen's take on Paris both in modern times, the 1920's, and - briefly - the 1890's. In it Owen Wilson's modern-day character ends up going back in time every night at midnight and hanging out with the post WWI ex-pats who ended up shaping a generation and more with literature, art and music. He deals with Heminway's unceasing manliness and clipped style, watches Zelda Fitzgerald torment poor Francis Scott, and basically just strolls around the Paris that he'd romanticized so much as an aspiring novelist. The experience inspires him, among other things, to take his novel in a different direction and do that pursuing of dreams we hear so much about.

Cobblestones. I'm a sucker for them.

It wasn't necessarily the movie itself, but it might have been part of it, that reminded me of a line in a book I'll talk about in a minute. In it two characters are talking about how a good piece of music can change someone inside, and one of them says, "We have an experience - like a chemical reaction - that transforms something inside us. When we examine ourselves later on, we discover that all the standards we've lived by have shot up another notch and the world's opened up in unexpected ways."

While I was watching the movie I was thinking that I need to read more of these authors, but I had a hard time justifying it since there are so many other draws on my attention. Watching the movie and then reading that line reminded me that when we read, or watch, or listen to something of a very high quality, it makes us better people who see the world differently. So when I'm ignoring my children as I read a book, it will probably help if I tell them that it's making the standards I've lived shoot up another notch, and they'll totally understand.

So long story short, I'm trying to kick it up a notch with my entertainment choices.

Like this:

I don't know if it elevated me more than just the thrills of seeing amazing things on a screen, but boy howdy, were these ever some amazing things. There's a scene in this thing that, let me tell you, it's just so freaking rad. The portrayal of Victorian London, the castle perched on a mountain side, the chess game where moves are shouted at each other without either player moving the pieces. Kristin put it best as we left the movie theater, "Well that was delightful."

Another thing that is delightful? Kristin.

I guess that's the movies so far of this year, right? I watched the Disney Beauty and the Beast again on a big TV in high def, and that thing is beautiful. It's the first time that I noticed that not only are the backgrounds hand-painted, but it's also in an expressionist style. Also, Belle is very cute.

No, not this one.

Next you can look forward to books I've read so far. Then maybe video games? We'll see.