Let's Name Some Guys

A love letter to car games, 90's baseball players, and being on your phone less

Cell phone service at the summer camp I worked at in the late 2000’s was notoriously bad. It didn’t much matter my first two summers working there, since my flip phone was really only good for phone calls, T9 texting, and very low resolution pictures.

Without getting too “old man yells at clouds,” I miss this era of the internet: all the information in the world was there, but we had to work for it a little bit. And especially being in the summer camp bubble, that meant logging into Facebook at the Apple Store in the Albany Mall or taking a laptop to Starbucks and getting an hour of wifi for free before getting booted off or paying to keep using it. At best, the internet was like a once a week thing—and when days off started getting less predictable, who knows when you’d find out about something, and if it was a really strange news story, you’d often get it second hand from someone returning from a day off¹.

Lately I’ve been referring to this time (2005-2010ish) as my medium tech era. It wasn’t the stone age: I had access to all the music and all the movies, and the ability to be in touch with people all over the world, but it was before all those benefits were fine tuned to be addictive and unhealthy. It was before the algorithmic levers were adjusted to drive us all toward meaningful engagement² and—I guess—generate ad revenue.

This was all on my mind during a long drive this summer that overlapped with toddler nap time. During some of the more boring tasks at camp (before the campers arrived), we would play The Movie Game: one of us would name a movie, the next person would name an actor in that movie, the next person would name another movie that actor was in, and so on. The games would last hours—sometimes starting in the morning, pausing for lunch, and picking back up in the afternoon.

By the end of the summer, we all got really good at Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

So during this drive, I created a simpler, more universal movie game³. I call it Let’s Name Some Guys⁴. There is no winner; there are barely rules. The goal is to go through the alphabet listing people, places, whatever based on any concept: Movies, 90’s Baseball Players, Star Wars Characters/Planets, Things Found In A Coffee Shop, etc… the only hard and fast rule: no phones. No googling. If you’re stuck on, say, the letter X, you either stay in the mind palace until you think of something that works, or if the most dire Name Some Guy circumstances, you bend the rules to make something/someone who is deemed close enough qualify.

Let’s Name Some Guys (LNSG) can be played solo; it works in a group; it works via text. It passes the time on long car trips and can easily be paused to spend time talking about an obscure baseball player your brother-in-law pulls out of thin air⁵. I highly recommend Naming Some Guys as a bedtime activity: usually I’ve been getting to H or so when first falling asleep, and will occasionally use it to help me fall back asleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. A truly versatile activity, especially for the trivial minded.

LNSG is part of a larger quest to be on my phone less. I’ve had some fits and starts with it: I don’t want to go full (or even mostly) luddite and ditch my iPhone entirely. I like some social media. I like having a great camera with me all the time. I like the ability to use my phone as a bike computer. But don’t want the news feeds and endless scrolling and AI created playlists to control me. I want the phone to go back to being a cool gadget. To borrow a quote from The Office, I want my phone to be an iPod that I can use to text people. I want medium tech.

A Song, An Album, and A Playlist

• Song: Oh! You Pretty Things by David Bowie—I’m kind of obsessed with the inclusion of an exclamation point in this song title.

• Album: Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes—some pretentious Seattle hipster music that fully embeds into your head and heart and it’s all you think about for days at a time.

• Playlist: Dad Bopz 24—inspired by a recent YouTube obsession, The Middle Aged Dad Jam Band.⁶

1. The strangest and darkest of these stories for me was Chris Benoit case, which was relayed to me after everything had come out about it—so I missed the stretch of time when he was missing, and then the assumption that he was a victim, and skipped right to the part where he was the perpetrator.

2. Read: arguments

3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Movie Game is less fun when one or more players can’t seem to remember the name of the guy who was in all those Avengers movies (or whatever).

4. Inspired by an old recurring Deadspin bit, where they would just share a list of football or baseball players that time forgot. No analysis or bits. Just a list.

5. This is where I recommend a truly incredible documentary about 80s Toronto Blue Jays legend Dave Stieb: Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb. That documentary, along with the other work that Jon Bois has done over the years, represents the internet at its best and weirdest.

6. A garage band started by comedians Ken Marino and David Wain that releases cover songs on YouTube. Wholesome internet content at its finest.