The Ned and Daron Report:
s/t

2002 has been a year of amazing and spectacular events; besides helping to co-write a script for a futuristic Basketball movie starring Norman Reedus (Due in theatres Summer 2003) and buying a tuxedo, I have spent approximately $1163.92 watching approximately 215 movies, $2757.35 buying 406 CDs or LPs, 46,810 minutes watching 985 TV shows, and $2893.75 eating out 452 times. Now, if you are like most people, you are, at this point, desperately calling around to all of your friends, trying to find out if they know me, or if they know somebody who knows me, in the hopes that maybe you will be able to find out more about me, and what I did this year.

“I wonder what Daron thought of each of those movies. How would he rate them, and what did he snack on (if anything) while watching them? Was it buttery Popcorn and a delicious Pepsi? What about Mt. Dew, did he drink that? What TV shows did he watch the most, was it Boy Meets World, was it the WB’s Birds of Prey? Do you think that Daron likes Taco Bell?”

I liked them, I would give them an 8/10, yes, it was popcorn and Pepsi, a few times Mt. Dew, no, it wasn’t Boy Meets World, but that is a good guess, yes, it was Birds of Prey, and yes, I do like Taco Bell.

Not everyone can be as intense and totally in your face as my man Daron, because he’s a mother freaking scientist when it comes to keeping track of junk. I mean, when it comes to having stuff at his fingertips, it’s like he has a list or something, which in fact he does. It’s very long and detailed and thus we can see that it should also be very convenient for analysis and pondering when we’re trying to analyze history. For example, we could use his list to help us figure out what 2002 was the year of.

A little bit earlier on I was in the same boat as Daron, and probably every other teenager in the USA, all ready to proclaim 2002 The Year of the Extreme. Although I myself am most certainly not one of the extreme, and, in fact, I don’t believe I know very many of them personally, if I were forced to rely solely on my screwed up memory I’d be ready to say that, to the extreme, almost everything that happened this year must have seemed like heaven on earth. Movies, of course, seemed to lean heavily to the extreme, and let’s not forget that extremity spilled over into TV, fast food, and carbonated drinks as well.

So, I pulled up Daron’s big list of stuff he did this year to get some statistical data to back up my impressions. I was thinking that I’d see movie after movie with names like “Extreme Yaks,” “Dancing on the Edge of Extreme,” “Fishing on the Edge of X-Stream” etc, but I was in for a surprise. Turns out that while extremity was fairly popular this year, it didn’t actually appear in any more of the movies than did, say, Cedric the Entertainer, and I disagree with the idea that we should call 2002 The Year of the Extreme and Cedric the Entertainer, because that would not have the kind of zing that’s required to get the message across in a culture as fast and awesome and crazy as ours.

Following this experience I decided to do some more research. I looked outside, and I saw neither kids sk8ing nor pulling moves on a BMX bike. I spoke with Joanna, a high powered executive at a well known Utah ski resort and she told me that this year they expect to see at least a 10% decline in snow boarding from last year [ed: last year was the Olympics or something] and that she thinks people enjoy regular non-extreme skiing quite a bit. I checked my personal 2002 diary and found that I never recorded ever having heard any actual dreadlock guy actually saying “to the extreme, dude”. Could the truth be that 2002 was The Year Burger King Came Out With a Totally Extreme Hamburger and Nobody Was Suckered Into Eating One? I don’t know.

So, anyway, I was going to knock your ass over because of Extreme Ops, but then I remembered that in 2001, about this same time of year, me, Pete and Admiral Duckass B went to see Out Cold, and that that movie featured even more spread eagles, and kick-flips…so now I am thinking that maybe you are right. Maybe even though there were some totally hacked events, 2002 isn’t as extreme as I thought it was. How were we ever going to decide what official tagline to use for 2002 if we couldn’t figure out what type of year it was?

Hackers and Exrtreme Ops actually have a lot in common. They’re both totally cool; they both feature cast-members from SLC Punk; they’re both tender and loving gifts from Hollywood to members of obsession-based teen communities that portray and crystallize trends and lifestyle idioms of their time with shocking, albeit subtle, accuracy; and they both star luscious tough-ass-bitch female leads with big puffy lips and a crazy shock of jet black hair.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hackers was released in 1995, which you’ll remember as The Year of the Hacker. That was the same year that The Net, Assasins and Kokaku Kidotai, which are the other three of the four most important hacker-themed movies of all time, hit the theaters.

So, as is proven by my speculation, and the line drawing I emailed you regarding Extreme Dating, I think it is only fair that 2002 get the title that it so rightly deserves; that of being one of extreme nature.

I wanted to mention that about Wil because it just struck me right now, and it seemed like it might be important. But moving on from the subject of Extreme Ops, I don’t think that we should necessarily say 2002 was The Year of the Extreme just because 1995 was so obviously The Year of the Hacker. But maybe that’s a vote in its favor? I don’t know. The important thing is that we objectively weigh ALL of the facts, we can’t just rely on our impressions, but every piece of historical data should be properly analyzed. I’d like to tell you about another historical datum that I think deserves consideration in our decision. It’s in the form of a factual story from my own life.

Where I used to work as a public servant I had a mechanical pencil they gave me that had an eraser receptacle on the end of it that you could refill. Naturally, every so often the eraser would get worn down to the point where it couldn’t erase anymore, so I’d pull out the stub and put in a new replacement. But the thing is, the little part of the eraser that went into the shaft of the pencil was also made out of eraser material, so when I’d pull out the worn down stub I’d always realize I still have half of an eraser left over here, it’s just not tall enough to use. I think you can visualize what I’m talking about; you’ve probably run into the same problem yourself. So, psychologically I had a hard time just throwing all those half worn out stubs in the garbage, that seemed wasteful, they didn’t really seem like garbage to me. So I threw them behind my desk instead.

The crack between my desk and the wall was pretty narrow, and the back of the desk went all the way to the floor and met it quite flush and I worked there as a public servant for nearly four years, the most of which time my main job was erasing pencil marks off of file folders so they could be reused.

Now, I’m not stupid or anything, and I could tell just as well as you can that eventually the behind of my desk was going to fill completely up and I’d discover a huge supply of bits of eraser rubber overflowing onto the surface of my desk. Actually, I couldn’t wait for that to happen. It made erasing those folders a lot more entertaining, because I felt like I was working towards an exciting goal and I couldn’t wait to see the look on my dumb boss’s stupid face when he finally saw how wasteful those crappy erasers were and how much of a mess his crappy office mismanagement had made for him. Eventually it got to the point were if you jammed your skinniest finger between the wall and desk you could feel the erasers heaping up, and then things really got spine-tingling. The rest of the office, well at least the semi-cool people in the office, started to catch on, and when people would pass by my desk on their way to the restroom they would always enjoy poking their finger down in there to see how I was doing and they’d laugh with me and joke with me and tell me to keep it up and that I was doing a great job. It wasn’t just my wishful imagination, I’m telling you straight, people thought I was pretty cool because of how much eraser crap I’d managed to save, and they loved being at least a little bit in on it, and to tell you the truth, they loved me. This one girl drew a picture of me jumping and doing flips on a pile of scribble that she labeled “eraser rubber” and hung it on the break-room bulletin board, and people thought that was great and it was like I was famous.

Well, eventually the eraser bits hit the surface and started flowing out onto my desk and it wasn’t much longer before I quit that job.