The final poster for The Muppets.

Some good may come of this after all. Brett Ratner may go down as the best terrible use of a gay slur now that Eddie Murphy quit as the host of the Oscars today. For a guy whose dream job is directed a film adaptation of Wicked, Ratner really put his foot in it. By the way, in addition to saying something really offensive about what is understood to be a core audience for something like Wicked, directing a musical would require a ton of rehearsal. That makes Ratner probably the worst choice possible for something like that.

Brian Grazer is the new producer, and there are a lot of pretty good options in front of him for replacement hosts. Neil Patrick Harris, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Myers, and past hosts like Billy Crystal, Hugh Jackman, and Steve Martin are getting tossed around on Twitter. Some of those may be great, but there’s an even better choice out there that’s gaining traction. With ABC, a Disney corporation, broadcasting this year’s ceremony, The Muppets must be the hosts for the 2012 Academy Awards.

Cinematical, Movies.com, HitFix, and others have all weighed in on the groundswell of social media popularity for this idea. HitFix even talked to The Muppets director Nick Stoller, who said that three months would be enough time for the production staff to make a Muppets-hosted Oscars work.

Just over a year ago, when the Jason Segel-penned script that would become The Muppets was working its way around and filling out its cast, they offered the female lead to Amy Adams. She was choosing between three different movies at that point, the other two being Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo with Matt Damon, and Spielberg protégé Alex Kurtzman’s directorial debut Welcome to People with new Captain Kirk, Chris Pine. Do you know why she turned down those other movies in favor of The Muppets? BECAUSE NOBODY TURNS DOWN THE MUPPETS!

Can you imagine the list of presenters or cameos in an Academy Awards ceremony emceed by The Muppets? How amazingly star-studded would that opening montage video be? Dom DeLuise, Tim Curry, Mel Brooks, Michael Caine, Cloris Leachman, Steve Martin, and Richard Pryor all had parts in previous Muppet films. Orson fucking Welles was in The Muppet Movie. Nobody turns down the Muppets.

You know when politicians get in the mood to reassert their feelings on an issue we all can unequivocally agree on, like being against terrorism or child pornography? Liking the Muppets is one of those things, one of those absolute certainties. There are people out there who do not prefer Muppets, for whom The Muppet Show and the Muppet films aren’t very funny. These people are Scrooges. Far more people from all four demographic quadrants of television viewers would tune in to watch this band of variety show veterans than watched the lamest Academy Awards ever with Franco and Hathaway last year.

The other hosts that have been bandied about, like Neil Patrick Harris, Jimmy Fallon, Ricky Gervais are great personalities and would be fine choices. Personally, I thought Seth Myers would be a pretty good idea, after his gigs at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the ESPYs. But here are the obvious roadblocks to any of those popular, well-deserving candidates:

• Fallon and Myers work for NBC, and the Academy Awards are on ABC.
• Gervais’ attitude and acerbic wit was perfect for the Golden Globes, a mockery of a legitimate awards show, but they wouldn’t fit right for the Oscars
• Neil Patrick Harris works for CBS, and has hosted the Emmys and Tonys, and he’d be the perfect combination of potential hosts like Hugh Jackman and Fallon, but other than How I Met Your Mother, his newest project is A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas.

If you haven’t been reading Erik Adams’ reviews of the first season of The Muppet Show over at The A.V. Club, then you’re missing out. They’re a fantastic look back at a show that was on well before I was born, but caught up on over the course of my childhood. I have a stuffed Kermit the Frog somewhere in the closet of my childhood bedroom. I frequently use Fozzy Bear’s line “wakka, wakka, wakka” the dismay of many friends. I grew up watching The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and Muppet Babies on VHS all the time.

Everything is there: the variety show format, the timing, the mass appeal. Everyone who has heard this story can construct easy bits for Fozzy, Gonzo, Dr. Teeth, Miss Piggy, Rolf, Kermit, and others throughout the night. If Brian Grazer has his head screwed on right, he’ll take this movement seriously and consider breaking with the horrific downward trends of recent years and get the Muppets to host the Oscars.

Paterno and Fitzgerald before PSU's 34-24 victory over the Wildcats in Evanston this year, now the final meeting between the two coaches.

It is a comparison that has been made over and over again since Pat Fitzgerald became the head football coach at Northwestern University. Headlines in the vein of “Is Fitz the Next Joe Pa?” have graced many a publication in the past few years. Hell, when Paterno couldn’t make it to the locker room to address his team due to a sore hip and leg when the Nittany Lions visited Evanston for Northwestern’s Homecoming a few weeks ago, he instead asked to meet Fitz’s three young sons up in the press box. The two men are inextricably linked, with many in the media trying to force Pat Fitzgerald into the Joe Paterno mold, no matter how hard he tries to stay out of it and forge his own way.

Today, Paterno released a statement announcing that he will retire at the end of the season. He might not ever get that chance. The board of trustees has yet to announce a real decision on Paterno’s future, and given the intense media scrutiny and pressure, the board may just decide to shove that resignation back in Paterno’s face along with a pink slip. The man is 84, he has no idea what the court of public opinion has decided on social media outlets. Seemingly everyone wants him to resign immediately, to not remain for even one more day at the university he gave his life to.

I’ll take a moment to throw my two cents in, just as everyone else even remotely close to caring about this situation has already done. I think about the three people I’ve known longest in my life: my younger brother, my best friend from high school and college, and a very close friend from elementary school. I’m almost 23, and to put these relationships in perspective, Paterno and Jerry Sandusky coached together and won hundreds of games, including two national titles, for more years than I can physically remember as a human being on this earth. There has to be group of current students at Penn State whose parents weren’t born when Paterno started coaching. I can’t fathom a 30-year professional relationship and friendship, but I’ll do my best to estimate.

As a writer, I imagine the hypothetical situation in which I work with my close elementary school friend at a magazine – for 30 or more years. We are integral to the success of our business and art, rise to the top of our field, whatever. Then one day, an editorial intern comes to my hypothetical office, closes the door, sits down, and tells me that he saw my friend and colleague of 30 years in a shower having intercourse with a 10-year-old. In all honestly, I can’t process that scenario. Dan LeBatard tweeted about the difficulty facing Paterno with turning a friend and co-worker in to the police earlier in the week, and I have to say I agree with him. I don’t think I would have been able to pick up the phone and immediately call the police. But a direct confrontation with the accused, though difficult, would be mandatory. I believe in my heart that I would talk to my friend about such a heinous possibility.

Perhaps a close friend isn’t the avenue to go down. I don’t know how close Paterno and Sandusky were over the years, but they did coach side by side for three decades. The Paternos do television commercials for the Special Olympics, a charity they’ve been involved with for decades, and Sandusky had his own children’s charity, The Second Mile, which in hindsight makes the accusations even harder to confront. Maybe I should imagine the scenario involving just a co-worker, in which case I’m still hopelessly out of my depth, since I’ve never worked alongside anyone for 30 years. I’m not even close to 30 years old. Kirk Herbstreit referred to what Paterno and others did as “getting it off their desk…passing it along to the next guy,” more concerned with self preservation of their own legacy and reputation than with sticking their necks out to bring a pedophile to justice. Paterno will have his 400+ wins in college football, but it will forever carry the stain of his inaction. Still, I can’t say I would’ve done anything differently, because I have no frame of reference. None of us do. 99.99999999% of us will never be in a situation even remotely close to this. So while it may make us all feel better to act morally superior and agree with the unequivocal position that was Sandusky was wrong and if we ever heard something like that, we’d go to the police immediately, I can’t help but reply that the black and white situation of sexual assault of a child in this case ignores a lot of details that muddled the situation.

Now that we know Paterno won’t be back for another year, the news focus will inevitably shift to the search for a new coach. Which brings us to Pat Fitzgerald. Even after the guy got a contract extension through 2020, there will still be rumors circulating that he’s a candidate for any high-profile midwest coaching job. Opening at Michigan? Hire Pat Fitzgerald. What about the revolving door that is Notre Dame? Hire Pat Fitzgerald. But the big one, the one that loomed the largest has always been Penn State. Fitz has been deflecting the “Next Joe Paterno” comparisons for years. I remember some time ago, perhaps on one of the Big Ten media days before the start of a season, when Fitzgerald was asked for about the thousandth time about whether or not he would be like Paterno and stay at Northwestern into his 80s. I loved his answer – that he would retire long before he got to that age, that instead he would choose an earlier retirement, spending time with his sons and having time away from football. It was the perfect answer to cement the fundamental differences between Fitzgerald and the totemic presence of Joe Paterno. Fitz is a unique coach who has had to follow in many footsteps of other coaches. Gary Barnett brought Northwestern its first football success in 50 years. Randy Walker continued it, and his sudden death thrust Pat Fitzgerald into his first head coaching job. Many at Northwestern hope it to be the only one he ever holds.

Why would anyone with as stable a position as Pat Fitzgerald ever leave his alma mater, where he is still entirely beloved, go to the largest vacuum of uncertainty in the college football landscape? Answer: it’s never going to happen. You know all that great tradition? That disappeared overnight. No self-respecting Penn State fan, nor any Northwestern fan, student, alum, anything, should consider a Fitz to Happy Valley move within the realm of possibility. The media circus that will infect the upper administration and athletic department at Penn State University won’t go away for a long time. A complete regime change is necessary, but nobody sees Fitzgerald making that leap. If he does, it’s an incredibly minuscule chance with a big buyout…forget it. It’s not even worth discussing the terms of a possible exit.

Perhaps the biggest unsung hero of the online Northwestern football community is NUHighlights, who posts extensive video highlight sequences for every Northwestern victory on YouTube under the name NUBears. The account also posts classic victories, including the ones from back when Fitz was out standout linebacker during the Rose Bowl season. One of the best highlights from that year was the home victory over Penn State on November 4, 1995. Fitz was in the midst of the first of his back-to-back Nagurski and Bednarik Award-winning seasons, but now there’s specter hanging over this highlight video, as well as countless other Penn State games. On the opposite sideline, Jerry Sandusky ran the Nittany Lion defense. All those big plays, the Darnell Autry runs, the long Dwayne Bates TD catch, and every other big play is in retrospect thwarting a despicable and perverse man planning the defensive scheme. The next time the game is replayed as a classic on BTN, that cloud will hang mercilessly in the air.

When Fitzgerald was asked to comment on the scandal at Penn State, all he wanted to say was to express his sadness. Everyone knows the respect Fitzgerald has for Paterno, from his playing days up to coaching against him at Homecoming a few weeks ago. Now, after this horrific scandal has ripped away Paterno’s legacy, I sincerely hope there is absolutely no reason for anyone to make the comparison between the coaches ever again.

There were other places I browsed for books. The two I frequented most were a Books, Inc. in Burlingame, where I used to spend a lot of time in middle school and high school before I could drive. I would bike into downtown Burlingame, get lunch, rent movies at Blockbuster – this was when they had the unlimited monthly pass that Netflix based its business model on – and browse through the shelves at Books, Inc.

I went to high school further south along the peninsula, and the most convenient bookstore around there was Kepler’s in Menlo Park. My friends and I went to Kepler’s because it was next to the café we always went to, even now when a group of us is home for the holidays we meet right next to the store and I find myself browsing for a few minutes if I arrive early. Kepler’s is a beloved independent institution that was on the verge of bankruptcy multiple times during my high school years. It always managed to stay afloat mainly due to community insistence that the store’s continued existence was mandatory. It had been there so long, it just needed to stay.

For whatever reason, I just preferred Borders. It had more books than anywhere else, and they were cheaper. Kepler’s had the right attitude, but was far too expensive because it couldn’t compete with lower prices from big chains. Books, Inc. was passable and in a good location, but it was right next to a library, and I always would rather pay nothing for a book than something.

The Borders on El Camino also holds a special place in my heart in relation to the Harry Potter series. It was where my mom and I went for the midnight release of the fourth book when I was nine. There wasn’t a party celebrating the release, only a silent line of very tired mothers and their children eager for the book that would signal the series shift from childhood fantasy into darker territory. I was there for the release of the fifth and sixth books as well, reading in the car on the way home, but enjoying the layout of the store, browsing through magazines, DVDs, CDs.

One of the young adult series I devoured as a kid was Animorphs, and as I got older I would still check to see if they had any left in the children’s book section, to see if anyone was reading what I grew up on. I graduated to browsing CDs, when I wasn’t going to Tower Records, DVDs when I didn’t go to Best Buy, but the real shift was when I started browsing through the miniscule poetry offering and perusing “Literature.”

A bookstore like Borders can be daunting, and also frustrating when they offer little new material in a desired genre, and I can’t really say that I feel bad about Borders closing for good. It ran a lot of small, passionate booksellers out of business, and Barnes & Noble doesn’t seem like the kind of company to live up to the last part of its name. Amazon is as cold and unfeeling as every online emporium, but I will always feel a warmth when I think about my buying experiences at that particular Borders. It was a ritual. When I drove by it over spring break this past March, it was the first time I saw the place closed up, and though I have no feeling either way about the fate of the corporation, the fact that a place where I had good experiences is disappearing makes me nostalgic in a way I never used to understand.

I walked through the Borders in Evanston when it was going through its last sale before shutting down and felt nothing, but I do feel a slight pang of regret that I didn’t get one last chance to browse through the aisles looking at bargain books in a mausoleum to a long-past due business model. Publishing is going to hell, and so is book selling, and the saddest part about it is the passion and wonderful experiences people associate with those institutions. My feelings on the “digital revolution” in publishing don’t belong here now, but I think I just wanted to remember what it felt like to walk through those easy-swinging wooden doors, walk through a store layout I had memorized, and know that there were enough books for me to find something that piqued my interest.

For whatever reason, that blog slowed down during the fall of 2008. School got heavier and I started writing for North By Northwestern, the online alternative to The Daily Northwestern. But then, as often does in college, something happened I didn’t expect. I started taking upper-division screenwriting classes – mostly with Regina Stewart, my favorite film professor from my time at NU – as well as getting accepted into the Writing Program in the English Department, which set off two year-long writing sequences, first in fiction, then in poetry. That diminished my writing output for places outside of class during my sophomore and junior years.

This past year I was an editorial intern at The A.V. Club, the entertainment-focused sister publication of The Onion, and home to writers I’ve followed and idolized for years, including Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, Tasha Robinson, Nathan Rabin, and Todd Van Der Werff. The environment was amazing, and as I worked my ass off to prove myself as an intern and earn writing assignments, my love for critical writing reawakened. I rejoined North By Northwestern as a senior writer, and churned out every article assignment I could get my hands on. Now I’m on track to be a freelance reviewer, actively seeking out paid opportunities, but I want a place I can call my own, a small corner of the Internet that will be used as a live and continually updated resume for all of my writing that doesn’t make it into some other publication.

Here are my goals for this new site in no particular order:

• Longer think-pieces on trends in television, film, music, sports, etc.
• Weekly reviews/analysis of television episodes, movies, albums, etc.
• Observations on the sports and teams I follow: soccer, college football, NFL, MLB
• Anything else that comes into my mind

Knowing myself as I do means I can’t promise constant updates. I’m writing book reviews weekly, contributing unpaid to a few other websites, and looking for a part-time job to make up the rest of my rent while I indulge my writing endeavors for now. This will be a place where I can write my thoughts on whatever cultural items are gaining traction as I make my way through my post-collegiate life. Stick with me, and join the discussion, this should be a damn good time.