It Goes To Eleven

Eleven years. That’s how long BunkoSquad has been alive. Since then, it’s become my passion, my pain, my nickname, my online identity for Twitter and Flickr and all sorts of things that the good people of 1998 couldn’t even conceive of. And so, to commemorate this eleventh anniversary, here are eleven pieces I’m particularly fond of – no special criteria, no particular order, just stuff I think I’m glad I got out of my system and hope made somebody along the line chuckle or think or forward to a friend or a frenemy. Hope you enjoy them, whether you read them the first time around or not.

1. All I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From Old Baseball Cards. Hard to believe, kids, but this HTML was state of the art in 1998. OK, maybe 1978.

2. You may know that I live in mortal fear of having an eye poked out by either an umbrella or an evil bird. So when I lived in Cambridge and had to spend the night with a bird in my room, I was lucky to come out with my retinas and sanity more or less intact. If you call it that.

3. You may remember when same-sex marriage was about to come into law in Massachusetts, the people who were against it thought it wasn’t fair that they weren’t allowed to directly vote on whether they thought it was okay. I couldn’t have agreed more, and I thought, if anything, they didn’t go far enough – that voting on marriages was fundamental to society and should be done across the board.

4. In the late summer of 2005, I was moving from Cambridge to Allston, but while packing, I couldn’t turn away from the TV and the impending destruction of New Orleans from Katrina. We all know – sort of – how that turned out, but I wanted to say what I had to say about New Orleans just in case it was my last chance.

5. My field guides to the 2008 Democratic candidates and Republican candidates, as well as a guide to who was in the running for the next Pope. I had fun with these.

6. On the subject of politics, we all had some good times and laughs when Dick Cheney was Vice President, especially when he thought his friend was a bird and shot him in the face. That led me to do some research, and I found out that the history of the nation was full of scandalous Vice-Presidential tales.

7. I do original reporting, too – like this loose transcription of an actual overheard conversation on an MBTA bus in Revere. Shoot, I hope they made the finals.

8. Was that a Lebowski quote? Yes, it was. And so that’s a pretty good segue into The Big LOLbowski, my favorite side project.

9. And while we’re on pop culture, I did spend a couple of seasons diligently watching, fretting over, and recapping episodes of Survivor, not least because it’s the only reality show that doesn’t make me reach for an air-sickness bag. I’ll never get what people – including people whose opinions I respect – see in some of those things, but since this show started it all, it’s got a special place in my heart. Well, maybe liver. The Best of SurvivorBlog should give you a pretty good idea.

10. When John Ashcroft was Attorney General in the early days of the Bush Administration, he came to Boston to tell a hand-picked crowd of supporters how great the Patriot Act was. The city, and notably its independent booksellers, went down to Faneuil Hall to protest, and I figured a little seasonal music would be just the thing to greet him. Plans to expand this into a booklet of Bush Administration Christmas Carols never got beyond the brainstorming stage, but those six months I spent in Guantanamo for sedition gave me the least snowbound winter I ever experienced.

11. October 2004. Anyone in New England who doesn’t consider those last eight Red Sox games as the highlight of their life is not a person I’d trust very far. When the Sox were up 3-0 on the Cardinals, the Internet saw an outpouring of heartfelt essays from people, aching for that last win, who wanted to see them Win It For _____. All that stuff, all those memories, all that frustration that had been building up for up to 86 years. I was one of those people.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: anniversary, best of bunkosquad, birthday