Mall of America Field

Tonight the Vikings play their first home game of the season. But the big talk isn’t about Brett Favre going up against his former Green Bay teammates (assuming any of them are left… I have no idea). It’s about the “new” Vikings stadium.

The Vikings don’t really have a new stadium. But after tomorrow (or whenever the Twins’ season finally fizzles out ends with a World Series victory), the Vikings will be the only remaining sports team calling the Metrodome home: the Twins are moving to the new Target Field on the other side of downtown next spring, and the Gophers have gone back to campus and the new TCF Bank Stadium.

Well, the Vikings surely couldn’t be left out of the stadium naming rights trend, and so they have rechristened the Metrodome — or at least its field — “Mall of America Field.” Or as I like to call it, MOAF.

As you can see in the aerial photo below, the new branding has already begun in a big way. It’s not the name that bothers me, so much as the font.

MOAF

Addendum: It seems just about every made-up sounding word is already a slang term, often a regrettable one, that can be found in the Urban Dictionary. And this is no exception. Just makes the whole thing even more regrettable.

All Things Must Pass

The late, great George Harrison. All things must pass. This is both a consolation and a warning: don’t let the bad things get you down; don’t let the good things pass unnoticed.

My Favorite Pomplamoose

I was delighted by what Pomplamoose did with their cover of “Single Ladies” (mentioned in my previous post). But I am in utter, slack-jawed awe at their distinctively twisted cover of “My Favorite Things.”

This is a song I know well, having devoted my undergraduate thesis to the evolution of John Coltrane’s treatment of it over the years. Pomplamoose has taken the song in a completely different, but no less unexpected direction. It’s absolutely wonderful. And now I need to go cry in the shower, Tobias Fünke style, because I will never in my wildest dreams be able to produce something this amazing in my own home music studio.

Single Ladies

OK, now I think I actually like this song. Of course, the addition of a Wurlitzer electric piano and a Memory Man certainly helps.

(Thanks to Andy Baio, who… uh… reads BuzzFeed.)

What year did you watch the most Sesame Street?

To those who question the value of Twitter, I finally have a retort: this tweet led me to the invaluable (seriously, you try to put a value on this) discovery that someone has posted the extended Friday end credits from many (most? all?) seasons of Sesame Street on YouTube.

It certainly takes me back, and is also a helpful tool to identify the year when you watched the most Sesame Street. OK, maybe most people weren’t as obsessed with this show as kids as I was, but… well… I was. I watched it three to four times a day. Seriously. Even once I was in school, I’d get in at least an episode and a half before or after school up until probably about third grade. (Yeah, having an Atari is probably what killed it.)

Watching these clips, I’ve determined, not too surprisingly, that it was season 9, 1977-1978, when I watched it the most. I turned 4 during that season. I do remember the credits from the next few seasons after that, but this one is most firmly etched into my mind:

Here’s a handy guide to the first ten seasons: