fearlumpy

Os-Ke-Wow-WOW!

2007-11-10T19:48:00.000-06:00

I'll be the first to admit that I had my doubts about Ron Zook when he was hired to coach the Illini three years ago.

Well, I for one am ready to eat those words.

The rap on the man has always been "great recruiter, zero as a game coach." The first part of that equation has held true (much to the consternation of "the great" Charlie Weis), but yesterday laid the second part to a lie.

Illinois 28, #1 Ohio State 21.

Read it and weep, Brutus. Midguidedly blame it on the refs if you want, but this was an old-fashioned smashmouth beating, delivered by a team that was better prepared and, yes, better coached than yours.

All kinds of key stats, but here are just a few:

Zero Illinois turovers;
One Illinois penalty;
4th quarter time of possession: Illinois 13:46, Ohio State 1:14;
Illinois 28, Former #1 Ohio State 21.

The game was won very simply. Nobody in the white unis was asked to do anything they weren't capable of doing. And in the final blood-draining drive, all that was asked was to block somebody and let Juice hang on to the ball. Four times in that drive Juice ran a keeper to get a first down. 4th & 1 inch, 3rd & 7, 3rd & 10, 3rd & 2. Each time the play call was right out of the 1912 smashmouth football playbook, and every time it worked.

The reason? How about Illinois' players were just plain tougher than the vaunted Buckeye defense. Just plain tougher.

One of the biggest question marks going into a season full of question marks was the play of the O-line. Were they up to Big 10 standards? Yesterday answered that and how. The offensive line won the game by winning the line of scrimmage over and over and over again in the 4th quarter.

And that's it.

It was football at its most primitive, visceral level. The Illini were up to the task and the Buckeyes weren't.

I can't count the number of times the Illini have been on the receiving end of that 8 1/2 minute game-ending drive in the dark to close-out a tough home loss. To be on the dispensing end, to mete out that tough home loss to 100,000+ Buckheads? Nirvana.

Now, barring a letdown vs. Willy next weekend (always a possibility), it should be on to a New Year's Day bowl game. And who would have thought that three months ago?

Shortest. Honeymoon. Ever.

2007-11-08T05:53:00.000-06:00

It's not Michigan-Appalachian State.

It just might be worse.

Gardner-Webb 84, Kentucky 68.

I've been following Kentucky basketball for a lot of years, and this is without question the worst loss the Cats have ever taken. Realistically, it has to be the worst they could take. How do you top a home loss by 16 to a team that has to be in the bottom 40 in any ranking of the 340 D-1 teams?

The only reason it might not be worse than Appy State is because it's basketball, not football. Appy State effectively ruined Michigan's chances to win a national championship in the first week of the season. This loss technically can't do that to UK, but this will take them out of any discussion about winning anything for a very long time.

In terms of national embarrassment, this has to be even worse. Although Appy State is D-2, they were already acknowledged as a powerhouse at that division. Not so for Gardner-Webb.

Also, Appy State at least needed some late game heroics to pull out a tight upset. This one was effectively over in the first 5 minutes. It was 11-0 before UK hit the board, and they never threatened the rest of the way.

Utterly embarrassing and humiliating in every way.

We'll see how the team and coaches react, but obviously the honeymoon is over for Billy Clyde.

Annnnd...We're Off!

2007-11-07T14:55:00.000-06:00

In what must surely be the earliest start that I can ever remember, the first edition of Billy Gillispie's Wildcats took the floor last night for a game that counts.

Granted, the opponent (Central Arkansas) was only marginally more impressive than last Saturday's exhibition foe (Seattle), but the 67-40 victory counts towards the season total nevertheless.

Lots of head-scratchers (a double-double from walk-on Mark Coury in 36 minutes on the court, 14 productive minutes from another walk-on, Kerry Benson, 20 minutes in about 16 minutes of court time from Joe Crawford), but some idea of the defense that's likely going to carry this team all year (20% shooting for the Scotties, and barely a point every other possession).

Another win tonight, this time over Gardner-Webb, will propel the Cats to the Garden next week and a date with UConn or Memphis or Oklahoma.

In Rainbows

2007-11-07T14:17:00.000-06:00

Having lived with In Rainbows for almost a month now, I can tell you one thing that might not be exactly earth-shattering.

Radiohead knows what they're doing when the make a record.

You could wish they did it a little more often -- it's been 3 years since Hail To The Thief -- but in one way or another they always seem to make it worth the wait.

Maybe it's just a hangover from the fabulous final episode of Mad Men, but the dominant emotion of this record seems to be the subject of Don Draper's emotional Kodak pitch: nostalgia.

Not overtly, of course, but this record is deeply suffused with a knowledge of and a feeling for the past 45 years of pop music, all filtered through a solid grounding in their own canon. They're not going to directly ape anyone else, but the Revolver-era Beatles vibe in the riff on "Bodysnatchers," or the Lamb Lies Down-era Genesis vibe on "Weird Fishes" are but a couple of examples of how this record serves to fuse past and present. The closest recent analogy is Beck's Sea Change, which seamlessly updated an early-70s feel to the 21st century.

Pulling it all together, of course, is Thom Yorke's voice, one of the most distinctive, divisive and, yes, beautiful instruments in music today. Much like Neil Young's voice divided the faithful from the unwashed in the '70s, Yorke's falsetto splits today's scene like Heston's staff.

Worth £4? To economists, maybe not. To me, most definitely.

Television As Pure Art Direction

2007-10-13T12:47:00.000-05:00

Well, it took most of the 13-week season, but in the end we finally got a little bit of character development to go with the art direction that has so far been the only apparent reason for the existence of Mad Men.

At times the show seemed almost to be a form of experimental television -- the TV show as pure look with almost no real story or character development. Now for me it actually worked on that level. The attention to detail in the sets and costumes is really nothing short of remarkable. It's like a full-scale version of an old home movie that rather shockingly brings to colorful life a previously black-and-white world.

By the end of the run we discovered chunks of Don Draper's misty past, Betty Draper discovered a bit of his smoky present, and Peggy discovered the mysterious reason for her ever-enlargening ass. For a while it seemed as though the show would never outlive its initial run, if only because it didn't seem to be heading anywhere in particular, but the final few episodes -- and in particular the wonderful season-ender -- leave open all kinds of possibilities for the folks at Sterling Cooper (Draper, Sterling & Cooper?) head into 1961 and the birth of Camelot.

Might Kuhn Be Proud?

2007-10-13T10:51:00.000-05:00

I might have taken part in a paradigm shift this week.

I downloaded an album

That alone was not the paradigm shift. What's new is who got paid -- and how much.

Radiohead released In Rainbows this week. But they didn't release it in any physical form. It wasn't in stores, but it was priced to move. And that's where the paradigm shift comes in. It was priced by me -- and by everyone else who wanted a copy.

The band released an mp3 version on their own website and invited all who wanted it to take it at whatever price they were able and willing to pay. From £0 to whatever (I paid £4, or a little more than $8). By signing up for it you do add your information to their marketing database, but the choice of how much to pay for the record is up to everyone individually.

And all the proceeds proceed directly to the band. Currently without a label, this all represents a giant experiment in how a major band can thumb their noses at the traditional distribution routes and take the product directly to the fan base, cutting out the middle man in the process.

It will be interesting to see what the results are (assuming we ever get to see the results), and equally interesting to see what the impact will be on sales of a more traditionally distributed physical product down the road (a plastic CD should be available in a couple of months -- part of this week's availability was a super box set which included a two-album vinyl version, a two-CD digital version, a bunch of extra graphical material, all available in December and an immedate download).

The most important question, of course, is whether the album is any good. Unsurprisingly, it is. But more on that later.

Wheeee!

2007-10-07T12:02:00.000-05:00

Well now. Lookee who's 3-0 in the Big Ten (no, I don't mean Ohio State). Lookee who's one win over a MAC team (or a bad Iowa team, or a bad Northwestern team, or a really bad Minnesota team) from being bowl eligible. Lookee who's riding a 5-game winning streak. Lookee who's riding a 2-game winning streak over ranked teams. Lookee who finally beat the arrogant Cheeseheads for the first time since 2002.

And Lookee who just got ranked (#18) for the first time since the end of 2001.

Aw hell, I'll just say it.

The F-ing Illini. And that's "F" as in "Fight, Fight, Fight."

The naysayers are still out there -- both inside and outside fan base. The "they must be cheating in recruiting" meme lives and thrives. A persistent (if shrinking) undercurrent of Zookophobia remains -- when will he pull a bonehead coaching move to lose a big game? Not yet this year, anyway.

In the end it was too much of The Chosen Person (160 yards rushing and 3 TDs for Rashard Mendenhall) and too much of the rapidly developing folk tale of Eddie McGee, who continues to do a Rollie Fingers -- creating the new position of football closer -- by running for the winning touchdown, and later adding a 3rd down run and a 4th down sneak for the game-closing first down.

The excellent new tradition of the team rushing the stands (i.e., the student section) after a big win was seen again (I wouldn't mind seeing it again and again and again). And the scene was filled out by a tremendous beauty. That's right, the wife was in the stands. Oh, yeah. I guess Erin Andrews was there as well.

Pics.

Is This A Test? Guess Not

2007-10-02T06:48:00.000-05:00

Oddly, for someone running in order to "protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," John McCain seems to have never read it (which is also apparently the case with a majority of his fellow Americans).

Mr. McCain said in the interview that he agreed with the results of a poll that showed that a majority of Americans believe the Constitution establishes a Christian nation. “I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” Mr. McCain said.

-- NY Times, September 30

For the record, the results of a quick Constitution word search.

"God" - 0 mentions
"Jesus - 0 mentions
"Christ" - 0 mentions
"Christian" - 0 mentions
"Church" - 0 mentions
"Religion" - 1 mention ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" - Amendment 1)
"Religious" - 1 mention ("no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States" - Article 6)

Why NOT Us?

2007-09-30T08:31:00.000-05:00

Perhaps last weekend's debacle at Michigan Stadium exposed Penn State as pretenders this year, but I still say that the Fighting Illini made a statement yesterday at Memorial Stadium. A couple of statements, really.

One statement is, "Meet Arrelious Benn." He turned his first kickoff return of the year into possibly the last kick he sees all year. The Phreshman Phenom parlayed a blasted middle of the Penn State coverage into a quick six and an Illini lead that they never relinquished in beating the formerly ranked Lions. A quarter later he broke a handful of tackles on the way to a 29-yard slant and run TD pass from Juice Williams.

The second statement is actually a question. "Why NOT us?" In a league full of what looks to these eyes as Ohio State and a bunch of question marks. At the moment we sit on top of the league (albeit with Bucky, Brutus & "the largest land-dwelling species of the Mustelidae or weasel family") and the first home win over a Top 25 team since 1991 make us 4-1, 2-0 with the only loss against yet another Top 25er.

A little more of this (starting with another Top 25 visitor next week, this time from cheese land) and that means a little trip somewhere at the end of the year.

More Unrelated News Items

2007-09-23T10:48:00.000-05:00

Item 1

Line in sand: Health-care veto
Bush opposition to bigger program reflects issue's importance in '08
By Mark Silva
Chicago Tribune
September 21, 2007

WASHINGTON - President Bush's promise Thursday to veto a major expansion of government-paid health care for millions of children reflects the political stakes in a newly potent health-care debate that is beginning to shake up Congress and resonate through the 2008 presidential campaign.

Just days after Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) made a splash with her own health plan, Bush abruptly called a news conference to strike back against Democrats' assertions that he is indifferent to children's health needs. A Democratic plan for greatly expanding the pool of children eligible for government-financed health insurance, the president warned, would move the country toward nationalized health care.

"I believe this is a step toward federalization of health care," Bush said in the White House press room. "Their proposal is beyond the scope of the program, and that's why I'm going to veto the bill."

The increasingly vocal fight over health care, in Washington and on the campaign trail, reflects the public's growing anxiety over the cost and availability of medical coverage. More than a decade after President Bill Clinton's health reforms died amid concerns that they would limit patients' choices, some analysts believe the public is now willing to consider significant changes to the system.

Item 2

'GM has options, union doesn't'
6 days after their contract expired, automaker and the UAW struggle with terms, including competitive wages versus loss of U.S. jobs
By Rick Popely and Stephen Franklin Tribune staff reporters
September 21, 2007

The outcome of contract negotiations between the United Auto Workers and General Motors Corp. could determine how many vehicles GM builds in the U.S. and the size of the UAW rank and file.

Talks between the two sides have continued six days past a contract expiration -- an indication that both sides know they face a critical juncture. GM is seeking major concessions on labor costs, while the union is trying to stem an alarming loss of jobs that began in the early 1980s.

...

GM wants to shift its $51 billion retiree health-care liability to the union, which would manage a fund and take on cost risks. The sides apparently haven't agreed on how much of the liability GM would accept, with the automaker reportedly offering 65 cents on the dollar and the union seeking more.

...

The union has helped out before, agreeing in 2005 to accept cuts in health-care benefits for GM and Ford retirees and over the years boosting productivity to lower the labor cost gap with Toyota to about $1,300 per car from $2,500.

But GM wants more, reportedly pressing for cuts in pension and health-care benefits for active workers, who now pay less than 10 percent of their medical costs; wage freezes or cuts; more flexibility in job assignments; and a two-tier wage structure in which new hires would get considerably less in pay and benefits.

The base UAW wage is $28 an hour, but GM says benefits for active and retired workers push the labor cost to $73.26. The Center for Automotive research says Toyota pays its non-union U.S. workers $45 an hour, including benefits.

That's why Cole thinks GM will move production to Canada, where national health care reduces GM's per-vehicle cost by about $1,000 compared to that in the U.S.

Hodgman's Keys To Success In Iraq

2007-09-13T16:54:00.000-05:00

"So long as you refuse to ever acknowledge failure, success becomes eternal, a downward curve always approaching failure but never quite reaching it. And that way it will go on forever."

Why You Love "The Sports Guy"

2007-09-05T08:01:00.000-05:00

From his fantasy football Top 50...

15. Travis Henry
A little scary because of the fumbling problem and Mike Shanahan's abject hatred for fantasy owners ... and that's before we get to last weekend's remarkable "nine kids by nine different women" revelation. Remember when we were all blown away when it was reported that Shawn Kemp had seven kids by six different women? If Kemp was like Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile, then Henry just brought the sports fertility record down to the 3:35 range. You have to admire the way he's spreading his seed around. According to the guys at Football Outsiders, Henry has the highest kids-per-partners rate (100.0) since they started keeping track of the stat in 1993.

The story.

Alberto No Mo

2007-08-28T10:29:00.000-05:00

The Tribune hits the bulls-eye with its editorial this morning regarding the end of our long national nightmare -- otherwise known as the Alberto Gonzalez years.

But Gonzales was less the cause of the problem than a symptom of a deeper ill: the administration's unwillingness to recognize that the attorney general has to put the interests of the citizenry above the interests of his president or party. To politicize law enforcement is to risk forfeiting the public's basic faith in our system of government, by suggesting that prosecutions are just a matter of who's got power.

I imagine the President and his minions must understand how thoroughly cynical all of these political actions look to the public. I suspect that it's part of the purpose. Encouraging cynicism regarding government only serves their ends, even as they nuzzle up to rip off the treasury while it still has something left to give them.

The only thing that would be more thoroughly cynical than what has happened so far is if the timing of this resignation was all based on allowing the President to make a recess appointment of another toady who would never be able to get Senate confirmation.

Anyone want to bet against that?

A Year Of Netflix

2007-08-17T07:01:00.001-05:00

I recently passed the year anniversary of having a Netflix subscription. Using their handy rental history I can see that I've rented 72 titles, starting with Bottle Rocket and ending with the two I have out now (and haven't watched yet), Badlands and The Bourne Supremacy (need to see that before seeing the new one). Included in that, though, is three seasons worth of "The Wire," which appears to have taken at least of couple of months to go through (but worth every second, of course).

Probably a good 80% of these were watched while running on the treadmill, so I have to thank Netflix for making it possible to keep up with the schedule because man, that can get really boring.

Anyway, it seemed like a good time to make a list -- is there ever not a good time to make a list? -- of the Top Ten movies I've rented from Netflix in the last year.

Of course, right off the bat the Top Ten list has to go to eleven. Just because. Of these eleven, six were movies I'd never seen before at all. I'd seen at least parts of the other five, but hadn't actually watched any of them through in their entirety for awhile. Maybe never.

Anyway, since five of the movies on this list were American movies from the era between 1967 and 1975 I can definitely say that this was a golden age for movies as I'm concerned. It's common wisdom that the one-two punch of Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 changed the way American movies were made and marketed, and that seems to have become a truism for a very good reason. It's true.

So, in alphabetical order.

Blow Up (1966) - As this post makes clear, I have a timeless fascination with the era when "London swing like a pendulum do." This movie captured the feel of the era like nothing else -- so iconically that it was thoroughly ripe for the tender satire that Mike Myers gave it in Austin Powers. David Hemmings is cool as a cucumber, Vanessa Redgrave is young and shirtless, and the birds are brilliant. Not really typical of the recently passed Antonioni, but interesting in every way.

Bonnie And Clyde (1967) - The movie (along with another one on this list) that kicked-off the golden age of American movies. The Faye Dunaway of this era may well be the most oddly beautiful movie star ever. But beautiful, really? Probably not, but dead sexy? Jeez yes. The level of violence seems tame today, but at the time it was seriously controversial and you can see why because it's not so much the graphic nature of the violence as it is the sensuousness of it -- particularly in the iconic final scene of slow motion mayhem.

Children Of Men (2006) - It's another truism that the best fiction about the future uses the setting as a mere trope to tell the audience about something timeless. Such is the case with Alfonso Cuaron's tale of hope in the midst of death, devastation and destruction. The tracking shot of Clive Owen leading Kee and the world's only infant through the sudden truce of solemn silence is just brilliant. Equally brilliant is the scene using "In The Court Of The Crimson King," one of the most cinematic numbers in rock history.

The Conversation (1974) - One that I had seen before, albeit quite a while ago. This is the movie that Coppola made between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II -- only two of the half-dozen best movies ever made. Think about that for a second. It's impossible to imagine a better series of three movies having ever been made. The movie equivalent of Talking Heads' triple-play from "More Songs" to "Remain In Light." Gene Hackman is pure paranoia as he completely misunderstands the nature and the scope of the conspiracy he has stumbled into.

The Graduate (1967) - Along with Bonnie And Clyde, the movie that kicked off the golden age. While the movie gave Dustin Hoffman's career a kick start, Anne Bancroft is the real revelation in re-watching this one. While it's notable that she was only six years older than Hoffman (she was 36, he was 30 at the time), what is even more notable is just how incredibly hot she was in this role as a sex-starved suburban mother. She absolutely sizzles. But at the same time, she never loses the pain and vulnerability that is also so central to the character.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) - If anyone had a stretch equal to Coppola's during this time, it might have been Robert Altman. Between this one, M*A*S*H and Nashville, Altman had a hell of a run as well. Warren Beatty plays the role he seems destined to always play, a mostly good-natured, thoroughly befuddled and utterly star-crossed striver. In this case, John McCabe fails to realize when the deck is stacked against him, pushes his luck just a bit too far, and winds up paying the ultimate price. And Julie Christie? I guess that it's possible that there has been a more luminously beautiful actress in the past few decades, but the name is slow to come to mind.

Pan's Labrynth (2006) - Guillermo del Toro's bookend to his buddy Cuaron's. A fantasy set in the past rather than the future, but equally conversant in both fears and hopes. Rightly known for the terrific art direction, set design and costumes, it is the fairy tale story set amidst the harsh realities of the last days of the Spanish Civil War that makes this movie so lastingly memorable. That combination of shining illusion and harsh reality holds right up until the last heartbreaking scene of the movie.

Shampoo (1975) - Take John McCabe, move him forward a century in time, and you've got George Roundy. A simple (simple-minded?) man with no mind for business and a bod for sin. Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn are nothing short of ravishing -- big surprise there, huh? Julie in a backless evening gown could only be matched by Goldie in a lamé micro-mini-skirt. And Lee Grant's turn as Jack Warden's disaffected wife is truly amazing. Hard to believe in this day and age, but there was a time when movies could be made that had three real-life female characters in them. A movie that loves women almost as much as its main character.

Trainspotting (1996) - The only movie on this list that I'd watched within the past couple of years. A movie filled with some of the most reprehensible characters you could ever not take your eyes off of. Has there ever been a more screamingly psychotic character than Begby? Claims that it glorifies heroin use couldn't be further off the mark. There is literally almost nothing that these guys do that you would want to have any part in -- apart from jumping into a cab back to Kelly Macdonald's place.

24 Hour Party People (2002) - Tony Wilson, R.I.P. Between this, Tristram Shandy, Alan Partridge and the ridiculously hilarious Saxondale, Steve Coogan fits easily into the pantheon of funniest Brits ever. Mancunian magic is in the air in this two-part tale of Joy Division and Happy Mondays and everything in between. Great music (obvs), but great acting as well. Sean Harris inhabits Ian Curtis to a degree that is downright spooky. Every taut, twitching fiber in place.

The Kids Are Alright (1979) - The Who at Woodstock was almost certainly the coolest that any rock band has ever been. Just the embodiment of what that word has ever meant. And it's very difficult to ever imagine Keith Moon making it to the age that Townshend and Daltrey are now -- his star was just that incandescent. The first (and only?) lead drummer. I don't know if anyone else was ever capable of playing the drums that way, I only know that no one ever has.

Funny Comedy Jokes

2007-08-11T15:47:00.000-05:00

Sooooo sweet (via You Aint No Picasso)

The Music Biz: 2007, Part 2

2007-08-09T06:45:00.000-05:00

Robert Sandall, in The Prospect, gives a great British perspective on the sea changes going on in the music business these days.

From a macro level, the value of the typical "music company" has both completely shifted internally, while taking a nose-dive overall.

This decline in fortunes has been noticed in the financial markets: EMI is being bought up by private equity group Terra Firma, for £3.2bn.

Almost as soon as the offer was accepted, Terra Firma were reported to be in discussions with Warner to offload EMI's recorded music division. The side of EMI that interested Terra Firma was its song publishing arm, the world's largest and a profitable performer. It is regarded as a safer bet because the exploitation of song copyrights is not subject to the same feasts and famines as the hitmaking process. As well as receiving around 14 per cent of the profit on any CD sale, the publisher has its fingers in other pies, such as licensing fees for films, adverts or any of the other myriad outlets which now employ music. Once upon a time, EMI's publishing arm accounted for about a third of the market value of the whole group. Now it's the only part that's worth anything to the people who venture their capital. It is no coincidence that Terra Firma's offer valued EMI at about a third, in real terms, of what it nearly fetched ten years ago when a sale to its competitor Universal was mooted.

In other words, the only real value of a music company is in the rights to license its music to commercials. Selling the music to consumers is a complete non-starter. Incredible.

And online music sales, the Great White Hope of the industry? Say hello to Jack Johnson's right fist.

The market for digital downloads was worth around $981m in the US last year, around a tenth of the value of the CD market. Yet the labels' great hope is that the slump in demand for physical formats will be offset by growth in the download market. This looks wildly optimistic. The latest figures from the US reveal that while paid-for downloads are increasingly popular—up 74 per cent in 2006 on the previous year—the surge in demand is slowing. And while the total value of music sales across all formats remained more or less static in 2004 and 2005, it declined by more than 6 per cent in 2006. The trade body of the American record industry, the RIAA, optimistically predicts that by 2011, the global online music market will be worth $6.6bn; three times what it currently amounts to. This situation will, as the RIAA delicately puts it, "leave the industry better positioned to offset physical sales."

Yet however it finds itself in 2011, the underlying truth is that recorded music, on or offline, has moved from being a high-margin, "high-end" product to a low-margin, low-prestige commodity.

The upshot? It really is a simple matter of Economics 101. What is cheap and what is dear. As Sandall points out, the development of the CD in the early 1980s was actually the first step on the road to where we are now -- awash in a sea of recorded music availability (both legally and illegally obtained).

If you can quickly and easily access most of a band's recorded catalog at a reasonable price (often zero), then it -- and any structures built around it -- becomes cheap.

What becomes dear is what cannot be quickly and easily accessed, and that is seeing the band live.

It is difficult to prove that the rising popularity and price of live music has been directly affected by the superfluity and cheapness of the recorded stuff. But it seems more than a coincidence that just as fans are spending less on the tunes they listen to at home, they will pay unprecedented sums to hear them in concert. Ticket prices, especially for A-list artists, have soared.

Back in the 1980s, a seat at a concert by a superstar cost about the same as one CD album. By contrast, last summer you could have bought Madonna's entire catalogue for less than half of what it cost to see her perform at Wembley Arena. ... Ticket inflation with smaller bands is less intense. But even a relative unknown like the American singer-songwriter Laura Veirs charged £15 for her London show at Bush Hall this July. More telling is the ubiquitous presence of touts outside low-key venues where no secondary market for tickets existed ten years ago.

Attendance at arena rock shows grew by 11 per cent in Britain last year, and looks set to rise again in 2007. The bigger the concerts, the more we seem to like them. Hence the explosion in the festival trade. In 2007, there are 450 such large-scale gatherings scheduled, ranging from the recent Glastonbury festival to the one-day Underage festival in Hackney on 10th August, which claims to be the first to be aimed exclusively at 14 to 18 year olds.

A rediscovery, or a renewed appreciation, of the communal source of music-making—and listening— must lie near the root of this upending of the music business. As personal stereos and MP3 players have grown in popularity, so has an appreciation that music isn't just something that goes on between your ears. The guitarist of the American hardcore band Anthrax expressed this rather neatly: "Our album is the menu," he explained. "The concert is the meal."

In his book e-Topia, William Mitchell relates the increasing value of shared experience to the isolating nature of electronic or online virtual worlds. "In conducting our daily transactions, we will find ourselves constantly considering the benefits of the different grades of presence that are now available to us, and weighing these against the costs," he writes. Being in the same place at the same time as a live performance, music fans appear to have decided, is the rarest and most precious presence of all.

So maybe it all comes back to what Neil Young once said. "Live music are better."

Fetish

2007-08-08T12:44:00.000-05:00

Remember when there used to be a thing out there called "the sensible center?" You may have to think about it for a good long time, because it's been a while since something like that existed. Pummeled by those on the left as being "reactionary cretins" and by those on the right as being "liberal wackos," it was eventually beaten to a pulp and left to die, at least in the U.S. Congress.

One example of what we've lost through this process is discussed by James Surowecki in a New Yorker article on the sorry mess that has been made of the idea that college students should be able to get loans to pay for school.

(The) convoluted process is good at making student-loan companies rich—Sallie Mae, the biggest issuer of student loans, earned $1.3 billion last year, with a return on equity that dwarfs most other companies’. But it’s not very good at getting government money to students cheaply and efficiently. President Bush’s 2007 budget shows, for instance, that it’s four times as expensive for the government to subsidize and guarantee private loans as for it to issue those loans itself. In other words, the current system is not just corrupt. It’s also inefficient. So why are we stuck with it?
In part, it’s ideology, and the dominance of what you might call the privatization mystique—the idea that anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. Often, this makes sense: the free market is more likely to come up with efficient ways of creating and distributing products and services than the government is. But the student-loan market isn’t a free market in any meaningful sense of the term, because the government effectively determines prices, insures against losses, and subsidizes volume. In this environment, most of the competition among private companies is really just squabbling over how to split up the spoils. Economists call this behavior—when a company seeks to manipulate economic conditions rather than actually create value—“rent-seeking.” It’s common in areas where the fetish for privatization has taken hold, such as the outsourcing of homeland security to private contractors and the boom in private Medicare insurers. (The private insurers are less efficient than Medicare and receive billions in subsidies from the government.) Outsourcing tasks to private companies is supposed to let government reap the benefits of the free market. But sometimes it just ends up uniting the worst of government and the worst of the private sector into one expensive mess.

Without a sensible center, decisions on how to best implement ideas get hijacked by ideology. And this is what happens when fetishizing a practice based on ideology, in this case outsourcing of government services, takes the place of a sensible practice based on truly maximizing efficiency. But even more than that, it also points out how a program that is implemented in this half-assed way eventually betrays the ideology itself in the pursuit of what is essentially corporate welfare.

True devotion to "getting the government off our backs" would lead to cashiering the entire system of government-subsidized loan programs, leaving students to do the best they could on their own ("with no collateral and uncertain future earnings") to cover the skyrocketing costs of a higher education. Oh, but maybe that wouldn't go down too well with the voting public.

Random Great Stuff: Brit It Girls

2007-08-07T18:00:00.000-05:00

From swinging Carnaby Street down through the mists of time. It's got to have something to do with the bangs...

Jean Shrimpton

Cathy McGowan

Jill Kennington

Twiggy

Paulene Stone

Celia Hammond

Pattie & Jenny Boyd

Jane Asher

Marianne Faithfull

Palooza

2007-08-05T15:11:00.000-05:00

A little bit of rain didn't manage to put a damper on our Day 2 visit to Lollapalooza in Grant Park. In fact the cloudy conditions were really something of a godsend, as the usually baking August Chicago temps were held at bay.

Sights, sounds and impressions...

The festival area is basically two mirror-image ends of the park, bisected by Buckingham Fountain (which, for those who may never have visited it, is easily one of the top 3 coolest things in Chicago -- literally as well as figuratively). The two main stages stand at opposite ends of the venue -- roughly Roosevelt Rd. on the south and Monroe St. on the north -- which literally puts them hell and far gone from each other. A good day's walk to get from one to the other.

In between are a couple of mid-sized stages and a smattering of smaller ones, but most of the day was spent on the south end.

Tapes 'n Tapes played the mid-sized MySpace.com stage in the early afternoon and definitely lit fire on a couple of occasions, especially on a new song called "Demon Apple."

Next was some blanket time while listening from afar to the absurd stage patter of Daniel Johns of Silverchair (as well as listening to their recycled 70s riffs). Daniel demands that you know the band IS NOT GAY!

On to the smaller Citi stage for a late-starting Cold War Kids set. Interestingly, despite the extended sound check, the band was close to inaudible near the middle of the largish crowd. The band had great chemistry, interesting rhythms and a distinctive sound. I think. Fact is, given the quality of the sound mix, all of that was way too hard to hear. Too bad, and this is definitely a band worth seeing in a better setting.

After watching Clap Your Hands Say Yeah get rather overwhelmed by the big stage, I split off to venture to the other end of the park to take in the rest of The Roots set as well as Regina Spektor.

The Roots were incendiary, a hip-hop answer to the JB's. A five-piece brass section (including the second tuba of the day -- take a look at those Tapes 'n Tapes pictures again) complimenting a suitably kick-ass rhythm section (bass solos, though ... never welcome).

Regina Spektor was completely undone (for me anyway) by the sound system at the bandshell (the one permanent stage also had the worst sound mix -- worse even than Cold War Kids'). Roky Erickson on the next stage over was pretty much as loud as Regina, and her style is really not conducive to trying to outshout the competition.

So I bailed on her after a couple of songs and high-tailed it back to the MySpace stage to catch the end of The Hold Steady's set. They may not officially hold the title of "World's Greatest Bar Band," but only because it's an unofficial title. The guitar riffs were chunky (and thankfully loud), and the stage patter included a heartfelt note of the fellas' recent hometown tragedy and the wild improbability of even the band's mid-range success.

After an hour of staking out a space near the stage, listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the big stage from afar, the headliner (for me, anyway) hit the stage. Spoon played a rock-solid, skin-tight, rain-soaked, hour-long set, with only four songs from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and the other eleven from the back catalog. A real greatest hits set.

The core of the band's sound is the rhythmic interplay of all four guys in the band. Every instrument takes a rhythmic lead, and the tight interplay gives the band its lean, angular greatness.

The real closer for the night, though, was Muse. I really had no idea if they were up to the task of closing a festival like this one, but I'll be damned if they weren't completely theatrical, completely over-the-top, and completely up to the task. Great light show, wall of sound, virtuoso playing and utterly remarkable pipes from Matthew Bellamy. Nicely done.

Unrelated News Items

2007-08-04T08:27:00.000-05:00

Item 1

Tens of thousands of U.S. bridges rated deficient; repair costs estimated in the billions
By: H. Josef Hebert and Sharon Theimer
The Associated Press
August 3, 2007

WASHINGTON -- More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.

That works out to at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Separately, the Federal Highway Administration has said addressing the backlog of needed bridge repairs would cost at least $55 billion. That was five years ago, with expectations of more deficiencies to come.

It is money that Congress, the federal government and the states have so far been unable or unwilling to spend.

Item 2

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy
By David Leonhardt
The New York Times
Published: January 17, 2007

...

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending. ... Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.

Lolla

2007-08-03T07:50:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow the wife and I and several thousand of our closest friends will descend on Grant Park for the second day of Lollapalooza.

Actually several thousand of them will be there today and Sunday as well. While the lineups for both those days held some real gems (Ted Leo, Silversun Pickups & LCD Soundsystem today, Yo La Tengo, Modest Mouse & Pearl Jam on Sunday, to name but a few) Saturday seemed like the best day to go, both for the day and the lineup.

The main attraction for me is, of course, Spoon, although Tapes 'n Tapes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Roots, and these two should make for a good day as well.

Nightmare Scenario

2007-08-03T07:34:00.000-05:00

I'm sure he only did it once or twice, but when I was a wee lad my brother would make a great show of threatening to jump out of the car every time we would go over a large bridge (most likely the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, but my memory is a little hazy on this).

The upshot is that it took me a very, very long time to not freak out a little bit every time I had to cross a significant body of water on a bridge -- driving, biking, walking, whatever.

So the recent news from Minneapolis was especially sickening. Not only for the obviously distressing thought of those poor souls who didn't make it home on Wednesday night, but the even more distressing thought of what their last few seconds must have been like.

Driving off the edge of a buckling abyss into the roiling waters (and they are roiling at that point in the river) ... yeesh. Hence the very literal title of this post.

"When I Hit On A Girl, I Need To Be Able To Talk To Her"

2007-08-01T17:50:00.000-05:00

At some point during your life's travels you may have met a special sort of someone. And it's possible that you thought to yourself, "Well now, that guy has got to be the biggest tool I could ever imagine."

Well, you would have been wrong.

Without question, this guy is the biggest tool you could ever imagine.

If You're 41 Year-Old Unmarried White Male, Stay Away From The Rail

2007-07-31T11:22:00.000-05:00

A study of ten years' worth of suicide data from the Marin County Coroner, published by The Bridge Rail Foundation, identifies the typical Golden Gate Bridge jumper: a 41 year-old, never-married white male who only came from within a few miles of the bridge to end it all.

If that's your demo, you might want to just take the ferry to Sausalito.

"He's A Habitual Line-Stepper!"

2007-07-30T16:10:00.000-05:00

Ran across this again this weekend on Comedy Central. Artie Lange calls it the funniest bit in television history, and he just might be right...

Just Answer The Question, Al

2007-07-25T08:26:00.000-05:00

Even in an administration consisting of nothing but embarrassments, surely this man is the dimmest star in the firmament.

The State Of The Originals

2007-07-23T15:32:00.000-05:00

With the recent conclusion of "The Sopranos" consigned to everlasting debate (although David Chase does seem to show signs of eventually adding his two cents to the issue), where does that leave the lineup of HBO's original shows?

Mostly finished, if the list on the HBO website means anything. With "The Sopranos" joining "Six Feet Under," "Oz," "Deadwood," "Rome," and "Sexy City" on the pile of former shows (and the somewhat smaller pile of excrutiatingly expurgated basic cable rerun shows), that leaves a small pile of current shows:

"Entourage" - Jeez, has this show jumped the shark or what? As bad as the last "season" became, the current one is even worse. Every episode now consists of two half-episodes competing to see which can suck more. One half-episode involves Vince and Eric trying to get their so-called masterpiece Medellin off the ground. If the touted trailer for the Pablo Escobar biopic is any indication of the movie, then Ari had better get Vince into as many projects as possible between now and Cannes.

The other half-episode involves Johnny Drama and Turtle in a weekly comic relief descent into wacky hilarity. Newsflash. If your show is a piece of fluff already, you really shouldn't need any comic relief. But Drama and Turtle soldier on, with each week's escapade proving dumber than the last. This week's involved Agent Lipari talking the two of them into overbidding for a '66 Sandy Koufax jersey under the mistaken impression that the Dodger great was about to get taken yard on the sandlot of life.

No such luck ... and no surprise.

"John From Cincinnati" - The reviews on the so-called "replacement" for "The Sopranos" have been pretty harsh. "Deadwood" this ain't. Yet, anyway.

"Big Love" - Missed the whole first season of this one, but picked it up this year without much trouble and am liking what I'm seeing. It's not fast-paced, but what story about a whitebread Mormon family would be -- well, except for the three wives thing. And wife number three is just awful damn cute.

"Flight Of The Conchords" - Give Tenacious D some wicked Kiwi accents and you've got this Sunday night closer that just beats "Entourage" all to hell. Jermaine and Bret play eponymous doofuses who are utterly at sea as they try to make it big in the New York folk-rock scene.

Or something like that.

Not as concentratedly funny as The D -- blame it on 30 minutes vs. 10 minutes as the story length -- but their songs are at least within shouting distance and that's saying a lot.

Viddy as they signify...

"Extras" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Both of these cringefests are between seasons for the moment, so we can all take a moment to unscrunch our faces. With the recent news in Larry David's world, the next season should be particularly cringeworthy.

So where does that leave things? Oh yeah, leaving the best for last.

"The Wire" - The good news: a fifth season is in the offing and has begun shooting. The bad news: this will be the final season as well.

The best of all the HBO shows will obviously be the hardest to replace, but at least there is the delicious anticipation of that final season. Even if the Emmy Awards have a hard time separating the wheat from the chaff, you and I both know that the fourth season of "The Wire" was simply stunning. And if the past of this show is any indication, the fifth and final will be the best of all.

If it seemed at times as though "The Sopranos" was limping to the ribbon, it seems simply out of the realm of possibility for "The Wire" to finish with anything but a hard-ass kick to the finish line.

Is It Wrong ...

2007-07-18T20:30:00.000-05:00

... to have a man-crush on Britt Daniel?

I think not.

Spoon on Morning Becomes Eclectic this a.m..

"I Think It's A Travesty"

2007-07-18T13:26:00.000-05:00

Tom Friedman lays it all out in today's New York Times. After years of playing games with the blood of treasure of the nation, these wretches in the Bush Administration are no closer to seriously examining what they've done -- and how to complete it, other than spouting tired cliches -- than they were when they first undertook to lie and deceive us into an ill-advised war and an unplanned occupation.

I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I were the parent of a soldier in Iraq and I had just read that the Iraqi Parliament had decided to go on vacation for August, because, as the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, explained, it’s really hot in Baghdad then — “130 degrees.”

I’ve been in Baghdad in the summer and it is really hot. But you know what? It is a lot hotter when you’re in a U.S. military uniform, carrying a rifle and a backpack, sweltering under a steel helmet and worrying that a bomb can be thrown at you from any direction. One soldier told me he lost six pounds in one day. I’m sure the Iraqi Parliament is air-conditioned.

So let’s get this straight: Iraqi parliamentarians, at least those not already boycotting the Parliament, will be on vacation in August so they can be cool, while young American men and women, and Iraqi Army soldiers, will be fighting in the heat in order to create a proper security environment in which Iraqi politicians can come back in September and continue squabbling while their country burns.

Here is what I think of that: I think it’s a travesty — and for the Bush White House to excuse it with a Baghdad weather report shows just how much it has become a hostage to Iraq.
...

Something is wrong with this picture. First, Mr. Bush spends three years denying the reality that we need a surge of more troops to establish security and then, with Iraq spinning totally out of control and militias taking root everywhere, he announces a surge and criticizes others for being impatient.

At the same time, Mr. Bush announces a peace conference for Israelis and Palestinians — but not for Iraqis. He’s like a man trapped in a burning house who calls 911 to put out the brush fire down the street. Hello?

Quitting Iraq would be morally and strategically devastating. But to just drag out the surge, with no road map for a political endgame, with Iraqi lawmakers going on vacation, with no consequences for dithering, would be just as morally and strategically irresponsible.

We owe Iraqis our best military — and diplomatic effort — to avoid the disaster of walking away. But if they won’t take advantage of that, we owe our soldiers a ticket home.

A New Low?

2007-07-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

It's been a week now since the President commuted Scooter Libby's 30-month prison sentence for lying to a grand jury, and the dust has settled enough to take a look at what (if anything) is significant about the story.

So is this a new low for George II?

Unfortunately, no. Unfortunately because this is merely more of the same hypocrisy that has come to define this President every bit as much as he has been defined by incompetence and hubris.

The President who has long called for tougher sentencing and mandatory minimums can lay all that aside when it's one of his own being sentenced. The sentence handed down by judge appointed by Bush, following guidelines established by his own "Justice" Department, following a conviction gained by a federal prosecuter also appointed by Bush, is now deemed "excessive."

I suppose that my considered take on the issue is that it would be cause for outrage or sadness if it wasn't so utterly, completely and cynically expected.

The cynicism shown in the action -- even the fact that it was a commutation not a pardon (yet! there will be one eventually) was cynical, as that merely allows Scooter to avoid the orange jump suit while still retaining his right to a 5th amendment stonewall of any further civil litigation or Congressional investigations -- is now only matched by the cynicism of the country which has come to expect so little from the smallest of Presidents.

If this were a parliamentary system he would have been ousted long ago, but it isn't. The unfortunate fact is that we are stuck with a man whose ability to lead is rapidly diminishing into insignificance, but who still has a hand on many, many levers of power -- from this pardon power, to the veto power, to the power established by his appointments to the Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary ... as long as they don't lose track of who they should be sticking it to and who's felonies they should be ignoring.

Il Inferno

2007-07-03T12:03:00.000-05:00

Lasciate i vostri pattini, voi ch'intrate.

Spent a beachy week with the family in North Carolina, and in case you weren't aware, it gets very hot in North Carolina at the end of June. Deep in the Gallagher family lore is the story of the hottest month any of us ever spent -- a week in Fayetteville, NC in the summer of 1965.

Anyway, first stop was Durham to meet with Noreen's cousin Rebecca for lunch at Mad Hatter's, including what was rightly billed as some of the best cake ever eaten -- we passed around a slice of Black and White, a slice of Boston Cream, a couple of cupcakes and a lemon bar.

Mmmmmm, caaake, ahhhgh.

Then we took a mini-tour of the Duke campus -- with Cait heading into junior year, it's unfortunately time to start getting into practice.

After dropping Rebecca off, we headed out of town by way of Chapel Hill and a mini-tour of the UNC campus. The early verdicts? UNC has an enormously beautiful campus, and even in the summer, Duke positively reeks of old money. Some pics.

From there it was on to Wilmington. Reminiscent of Savannah, but without quite as much history, quite as much candy, or quite as much sawmill smell.

Much walking around on Sunday (including a bit of browsing at CD Alley, where I picked up some Spoon-y vinyl) followed by lunch at the Dixie Grill. I had the curiously named, but nevertheless yummy Roethlisberger (mixing hamburger and sausage) with sweet potato fries. Curiously named because it's extremely unclear whether Ben Roethlisberger has ever set foot in Wilmington, NC.

From Wilmington it was on to Atlantic Beach, our vacation destination for the week.

On the southern end of the Outer Banks, hard by the ocean (guess which one), I hadn't really heard much -- call it none -- about the place before alighting there. Inland it was pretty scorching, but by the beach it was breezy and cooler, and everywhere it was non-stop sunny skies.

Played a little tennis, ran on the beach a few times, and ate a whole lot of seafood and East Carolina barbecue (chopped smoked pork, vinegary sauce, hushpuppies galore and Brunswick Stew to die for). At least three times -- including once at a pig-pickin' -- I ate enough to make a plausible Spartacus-style Roman of myself. Which way to the vomitorium?

Scenes from a beach.
Our one "big" side trip of the week was to Cape Lookout National Seashore, about 13 miles away as the crow flies, but about a 45 minute car ride + a 15 minute boat ride to get to.

But well worth the trip.

Some Things Never Change

2007-06-22T06:16:00.000-05:00

I guess that one heartening thing about reading The March Of Folly, a 1984 book by Barbara Tuchman, is that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is not the biggest screw up in history.

In fact the steps taken by the British to maneuver the colonies into armed revolt must almost certainly take that title -- and this is in fact one of her four case studies of "the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests."

While she examines the fall of Troy, and the actions of the Vatican leading to the Reformation, the bulk of the book looks at the how the British "lost America" and how the U.S. bungled into, through, and out of war in Vietnam.

If the heartening part is understanding the historical proclivity to screw it up, the disheartening thing is just how clearly applicable the lessons of those two failures should have been for the current fiasco -- and just how clearly they were ignored.

For instance, does this line seem to resonate?

"The prospect of defeat under "my" command pleases no ruler, and rather than face it, George tried obstinately to prolong the war long after it held any hope of success."

That's King George III, by the way. Kicking the can down the road as a tactical substitute for lack of strategy has a much longer history than the current occupant.

But the lost lessons of Vietnam are, if anything, even more disheartening, as that disaster was well within the lifetimes of those responsible for the immediate disaster. Any of this make sense in the current environment?

"The follies that produced this result begin with continuous overreacting: in the invention of endangered "national security," the invention of "vital interest," the invention of a "commitment" which rapidy assumed a life of its own, casting a spell over the inventor ... it was a failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill. 'Nation building' was the most presumptuous of the illusions."

In the end, I suppose that the final heartening aspect to this is that three of the four examples show that colossal disasters need not be permanently debilitating. The Catholic church is still around, the British empire continued unabated for more than a century, and the U.S. quickly recovered its footing despite losing our "vital interest" in Southeast Asia.

It remains to be seen, of course, what will be the long term implications of the current folly. One certainty is that if Barbara Tuchman were still alive we would someday see a revised and updated version of this book to include a fifth case study.

Reasons YOU Might Love The '80s...

2007-06-21T08:10:00.000-05:00

3 videos featuring dudes wearing lipstick.

NoMSA-Ss

2007-06-17T16:23:00.000-05:00

Friday's Blues On The Fox in Aurora featured what is surely one of my Top 10 fav bands, a back-to-a-threesome version of the North Mississippi All-Stars. It also featured a cherry-bomb bratwurst and a shot of something that "tastes like ass" at the Mike Laurx estate's pre-show get-together.

Given the street venue and the free-for-all crowd, it was a short set and featured a number of covers surely aimed at giving an unfamiliar crowd a taste of something they recognized ("La Grange" and "Sunshine Of Your Love" were stellar, but the version of "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" was pretty much just flat out pandering. Some pics.

Episode The Final

2007-06-16T16:14:00.000-05:00

And now comes the last to weigh in on The Sopranos' final episode.

Me.

I suppose it's a testament to something -- either the brilliance or the arrogance of David Chase's conclusion to the show -- that opinions on the ending ranged from one end of the spectrum to the other.

What we know.

Phil Leotardo has a flathead, and I'm not talking about his screwdriver set.
A.J. is a tool, and I'm not talking about a screwdriver here, either.
Carlo made like Olga Korbut and flipped.
Agent Harris is hairy, horny and maybe a little too invested in his surveillance targets.
Patsy Parisi's wife used to be "Angie" back in the day.
Janice is still self-obsessed and manipulative ... oh wait, that's everyone in the show.
A.J.'s new young thing is smokin' hot, as is his SUV.
Sometimes it can be very frustrating to get ketchup out of a bottle.

What we think we know.

The forevermore infamous blackout ending is indeed meant to tell us that Tony was whacked by the guy in the Member's Only jacket. There were just too many references to "not hearing a thing" and "everything going black" to make anything else a viable explanation. Add to that the fact that Gandolfini is on record as never wanting to play the character again, and it's pretty clear that Tony took one in the melon.
Meadow was on her way into Holsten's in order to tell her family that she was pregnant. Problems with her birth control ... problems parallel parking ... problems, problems, problems.
The real Holsten's does not appear to even have onion rings on the menu.
That Ade has apparently been reincarnated as a cat. I mean, what was with the cat? And if she was staring at Christofa was it because she still loved him or because she wanted to scratch his eyes out for ratting her out to Tony & Sil?

What we don't know.

Why so many people were either pissed off or disappointed by the ending. To me it seems deft and appropriate. The show was Tony's life, and with the end of that life comes blackness on the screen. No ending was about to satisfy everyone, but this was enough to satisfy me.

The Shelf Life Of Greatness

2007-06-07T06:37:00.000-05:00

Really interesting Sports Guy piece here, about the perishability of "greatness" in sports.

While I don't completely agree all of his conclusions, the idea that we quickly forget the greats of the past and downgrade them in comparison with those of the present (and even the future) is absolutely true.

At least in basketball.

His examples are all concerning basketball, and this is certainly the sport in which the idea resonates most clearly. An example was in the Tribune just yesterday, as Sam Smith ranked (I know, but it's relevant and recent) the greatest NBA dynasties.

#1 on the list was the Celtics of the '50s & '60s, if only because how can you ignore 8 in a row and 11 of 13? The twist of the knife comes in the blurb, "Perhaps they didn't have the best players ever because the league then was so small and so white. But they dominated like no team ever."

So, Simmons' point about John Havlicek's forgotten greatness is explained by what, his ... whiteness, Sam?

#4 on the list was the Minneapolis Lakers of the early '50s, dismissed by Smith in this way, "They make the list for sheer domination in their era. Who knows if any but George Mikan even could make a team today?"

I guess that's the issue in a nutshell. The thing about basketball (in comparison certainly to baseball) is that it is a game of creativity as well as (and sometimes as much as) athleticism.

As with any creative enterprise, basketball is conditioned by its environment. Music in 2007 is not the same as music in 1951 because of the incremental changes that have built upon previous incremental changes (as well as the odd creative leaps). To say that someone making music in 1951 wasn't making the same music as someone in 2007 is not the same as saying that they couldn't make the same music. The context has changed.

Likewise with basketball, the context has changed. Players didn't do a lot of things in 1951 that we take for granted now. Partially that is because they are bigger and stronger and better fed (as is the entire population), partially that is because they are better trained (based on better knowledge about, appreciation of, and money devoted to better training), and partially that is because the things players do now have grown out of the things players have created in the intervening 56 years.

In other words, players didn't do a lot of things in 1951 that we take for granted now, partially because they didn't know they could. Because no one had ever done them before.

This, of course, is exactly what defines the greatness of a Pete Maravich or a Julius Erving -- greatness in spite of the lack of statistical backup for that greatness. Their way of playing wrenched the whole game forward (usually kicking and screaming) through a paradigm shift.

Vern Mikkelsen played in six NBA All-Star games in seven years for the Minneapolis Lakers in the 1950s. He was born in 1928, meaning that his formative years were in the Depression, where nutrition could be scarce, yet he grew to be 6'7" and 230 pounds in his playing days. Now if Sam Smith is saying "if you magically transported the Vern Mikkelsen of 1951 and placed him down in 2007, he wouldn't be able to make a team in the NBA," I'd say he's wrong.

If Sam Smith is saying "if you magically transported Vern Mikkelsen such that he was born in 1984, and that having been subject to all of the training and nutrition improvements of the intervening 56 years, and that having grown up watching Julius Erving and Ervin Johnson and Larry Bird and all the other players of roughly his size doing amazing things he still wouldn't be able to make a team in the NBA," then of course I'd say he's completely full of shit.

Anyway, Simmons' conclusion about why this historical dismissal happens is:

We'd like to believe that our current stars are better than the guys we once watched.

Why? Because the single best thing about sports is the unknown. It's much more fun to think about what could happen than about what already has. We don't want LeBron to be as good as MJ; we need him to be better than MJ. We already did the MJ thing. Who wants to rent the same movie twice? We want LeBron to take us to a place we've never been. It's the same reason we convince ourselves that Shaq is better than Wilt and Steve Nash is better than Bob Cousy. We don't know these things for sure. We just want them to be true.
There's a much simpler reason that we're incapable of fully appreciating the past. As the Havlicek broadcast proved to me, it's easy to forget anything if you stop thinking about it long enough ...

He's got two reasons for the historical myopia there, one somewhat complex, one simple.

I'll take the simple one. Stop thinking about how great John Havlicek was, or the 1951 Minneapolis Lakers were, and they stop being great.

And if you do think about them at all, go ahead and remove them from their context, and then you can go ahead and tell us how really awful they actually were.

Women In Art

2007-06-07T06:25:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen this, then you haven't seen anything like this.

That Happened When?

2007-06-06T07:22:00.000-05:00

As the series comes to a close, a random walk through one man's Soprano's highlights.

Sil takes Ade for one last ride - "Long Term Parking" - Season 5, Episode 12 - May 23, 2004
Junior gives Tony a belly buster - "Members Only" - Season 6, Episode 1 - March 19, 2006
Big Pussy sleeps with the fishes - "Funhouse" - Season 2, Episode 13 - April 9, 2000
Philly Parisi takes a loud one in the temple - "Guy Walks Into A Psychiatrists Office" - Season 2, Episode 1 - January 16, 2000
Paulie's Ma ... ain't his Ma - "The Fleshy Part Of The Thigh" - Season 6, Episode 4 - April 2, 2006
Ade spews - "No Show" - Season 4, Episode 2 - September 22, 2002
Christofa sits on Cosette, no more Cosette - "The Strong Silent Type" - Season 4, Episode 10 - November 17, 2002
Christofa bangs his cuz's hot girlfriend - "D-Girl" - Season 2, Episode 7 - February 27, 2000
A.J. smashes up his school - "The Telltale Moozadel" - Season 3, Episode 9 - April 22, 2001
Sil torches Vesuvio - "The Sopranos" - Season 1, Episode 1 - January 10, 1999
Tony's Ma OK's his hit - "Isabella" - Season 1, Episode 12 - March 28, 1999
Tony takes a pillow to his Ma - "I Dream Of Jeannie Cusamano" - Season 1, Episode 13 - April 6, 1999
Carmine keels with a mouthful of egg salad - "Two Tonys" - Season 5, Episode 1 - March 7, 2004
Tony B. gets a faceful - "All Due Respect" - Season 5, Episode 13 - June 6, 2004
Jackie Aprile expires - "Meadowlands" - Season 1, Episode 4 - January 31, 1999
Jackie Jr. is expired - "The Army Of One" - Season 3, Episode 13 - May 20, 2001
Janice kills Richie Aprile - "The Knight In White Satin Armor" - Season 2, Episode 12 - April 2, 2000
Patsy Parisi delivers the kiss-off to Gloria - "Amour Fou" - Season 3, Episode 12 - May 13, 2001
Tony throttles Ralphie - "Whoever Did This" - Season 4, Episode 9 - November 10, 2002
Christofa & Paulie chase down and whack Mikey Palmice - "I Dream Of Jeannie Cusamano" - Season 1, Episode 13 - April 6, 1999
The Russian "interior decorator" disappears - "Pine Barrens" - Season 3, Episode 11 - May 6, 2001
Gigi dies on the can - "He Is Risen" - Season 3, Episode 8 - April 15, 2001
The hit on Christofa goes wrong - "Full Leather Jacket" - Season 2, Episode 8 - March 5, 2000
Tony kills Christofa - "Kennedy and Heidi" - Season 6, Episode 18 - May 13, 2007
Tony & Pussy whack Matt Bevilacqua - "From Where To Eternity" - Season 2, Episode 9 - March 12, 2000
Furio considers throwing Tony into a propeller - "Eloise" - Season 4, Episode 12 - December 1, 2002
Tony busts-out Davey Scatino - "Bust-Out" - Season 2, Episode 10 - March 19, 2000
Tony visits campus, whacks a snitch - "College" - Season 1, Episode 5 - February 7, 1999
Dr. Melfi is attacked - "Employee Of The Month" - Season 3, Episode 4 - March 18, 2001
Christofa creeps out Gandhi - "Luxury Lounge" - Season 6, Episode 7 - April 23, 2006
Finn spies Vito with a mouthful - "Unidentified Black Males" - Season 5, Episode 9 - May 2, 2004
"I Love You, Johnnycakes" - "Moe n' Joe" - Season 6, Episode 10 - May 14, 2006
Tony Dreams at the Ritz - "The Test Dream" - Season 5, Episode 11 - May 16, 2004
Christofa cries in acting class - "Big Girls Don't Cry" - Season 2, Episode 5 - February 13, 2000
Richie pounds Beansie - "Toodle-Fucking-Oo" - Season 2, Episode 3 - January 30, 2000
Tony looks up Johnny Soprano's goomah - "In Camelot" - Season 5, Episode 7 - April 18, 2004
Joey Peeps' headstone says "PEEPS" - "Unidentified Black Males" - Season 5, Episode 9 - May 2, 2004
Frankie Valli gets whacked - "Luxury Lounge" - Season 6, Episode 7 - April 23, 2006
Sal whacks Jimmy Petrille - "I Dream Of Jeannie Cusamano" - Season 1, Episode 13 - April 6, 1999
Vito is outed - "Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request" - Season 6, Episode 5 - April 9, 2006
Sil gets a lead shirt - "The Blue Comet" - Season 6, Episode 20 - June 3, 2007

Sweater Song

2007-06-05T08:19:00.000-05:00

Saw this on TV last night, for the first time in many years. Great song, great video, great glasses.

Bloody Hell

2007-06-04T16:17:00.000-05:00

The Sopranos picked up a great deal of steam last night, one week away from the series' finale.

Bobby Baccala? Dead!

Silvio Dante? (practically) Dead!

Phil Leotardo!?!? Dea... Oops, Not Dead! ("They call it 'gone to ground'." "Who does?")

And where is Tony Soprano? Still alive, but gone to the mattresses.

The internets are rife with speculation about next week's wrap-up. So many loose threads, so little time.

For me, Agent Harris has been making a few too many appearances lately to not figure into this somehow. In one way or another I see Tony, out of options and facing either coming in or going six feet under, turning himself into Witness Protection.

It just seems as though Sil's lead poisoning drastically closed the options for Tony to resume anything like his former life.

Also, no way we don't find out that Paulie Walnuts (and/or Patsy Parisi?) hasn't been (and still is) a mole for Phil Leotardo.

Best moment of the episode (one of the top five or ten in the show's run): Tony and Sil's Raging Bull pantomime when Cavalleria Rusticana comes on the Nuovo Vesuvio musak system. A fitting bookend to Sil's Michael impression from the first season.

"Wait, One More Thing ...

2007-06-04T06:52:00.000-05:00

... I know I signed the contract, and had the press conference, and the Magic started selling season tickets floggin' my mug, but I guess I'd really rather just stay at Florida. Is that OK?"

So Billy D. has announced that he will be staying in Gainesville for the rest of his career. I certainly wouldn't expect any more interest from the NBA anytime soon.

Do you suppose the Magic will also be letting the poor schmucks who clicked that season tickets link off the hook as well?

I suppose it won't make any difference for The Kid in the long run. It would be nice if recruits (and their parents) would take this into account (opposing coaches will be mentioning it), but they probably won't.

Strange story all around, but I suppose the Magic don't want a coach that doesn't want to actually coach them, and they can't afford the the PR hit of making the guy pay any price for making them look like fools, and so that's that.

I can't say it won't be fun to see Billy G. build a monster that will beat the crap out of this guy for year after year again. Doing it to Anthony Grant wouldn't be quite the same thing.

It Was ... 40 Years Ago This Month

2007-06-02T10:48:00.000-05:00

Lots of "Summer of Love" pieces coming up in the next few months. Included in that will surely be a spate of Sgt. Pepper pieces, all of which will have some variation of the lame title I gave this post. The iconic 60s album was released in June, 1967 and that 40 year anniversary has already got things rolling.

One end of the spectrum is represented by this fawning appraisal in the Tribune yesterday:

The artistic community occasionally flatters itself by telling the rest of us how art transforms society. Only isolated examples exist of this transformation. Pablo Picasso's 1937 painting "Guernica" mobilized much of the world against fascism. Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery tract "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the best-selling novel of the 19th Century, was an integral part of American history. When President Abraham Lincoln was introduced to Ms. Stowe after the outbreak of the Civil War, he remarked, "So this is the little lady who made this big war."

But instances of art transmogrifying society might only occur once in a lifetime. Since the Beatles' release of "Sgt. Pepper," nothing the artistic community has produced has had a comparable effect on society. The album changed the lives, in some way or another, of virtually every American who was alive then, and it continues to reverberate for the generations born since. It was that "once-in-a-lifetime" work of art.

Wow.

Then on the other hand you've got this critical reappraisal from salon.com:

If you were to play the album for someone who knew nothing about the '60s and told them that "Sgt. Pepper" was somehow representative of that time, it's hard to imagine what conclusions they would draw.

I don't buy it as a generation-defining album. I think that's been put on it in retrospect. "Sgt. Pepper" is completely missing the generational strife of the time; there are no political overtones. It may be representative of how many people experienced that period -- "I like that dress! Paisley is cool!" -- but it doesn't seem like a defining album for the generation of Mario Savio or Huey Newton.
...
I wonder if the reason "Sgt. Pepper" attracts such a conspicuous amount of critical praise is that the songs actually don't hold up as examples of the band's best work. Justifying "Sgt. Pepper's" status requires a lot of bluster.

I can't really explain calling it the greatest album of all time. One of my gripes about rock critics is listmania. What does it say that "Sgt. Pepper" is rated so highly? It just seems so obvious that "Abbey Road" is a better album, that "Revolver" is a better album.

For myself, I have to follow the salon line on this. Those who consider this the "greatest album of all time," or even the "greatest Beatle album ever," or even a "great" album, probably haven't listened to it for a while.

Good? Sure.

Great? Mmm, not so much.

Greatest of all time? Are you still high?

"A Day In The Life" is undeniably a great song, and yes it was truly groundbreaking for its time.

But too much of the album is tin-pan alley stuff, and I'm not only talking about the McCartney songs. Too many of John's songs are hokey hokum as well -- "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite"? What the hell is that?

Salon mentions Abbey Road and Revolver as better Beatle albums. I'd throw Rubber Soul and The White Album on that pile as well. It's unlikely that I'd put Sgt. Pepper's in the top half-dozen Beatle albums.

As far as the greatest or "most important" of all time goes, it's nowhere on the list.

And Here We Go Again

2007-06-01T05:59:00.000-05:00

So is this why the Cats couldn't lure Billy D up from Gainesville two months ago?

Did he have the league in mind all along?

Or was the cash just piled too high to finally turn down?

My money's on the latter. Not that I have $5.5 mil a year to pile up for 5 years. Eddie Munster's got that.

In any case, the Orlando Magic reportedly gave him 27.5 million reasons to reconsider his dedication to a team which had just lost its top six players.

What is unknown is how much consideration he gave to the many good reasons to avoid the jump. Reasons named Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Mike Montgomery, Lon Kruger, Tim Floyd, Leonard Hamilton ... even Steve Spurrier.

Now the difference may be that Donovan inherits a much better team than any of those guys did. In most of those cases, the teams they went to were legitimately awful (legendarily bad in the case of the Bulls team that Tim Floyd bounced to). Dwight Howard, for one, is a legitimate franchise player, something none of the others enjoyed (among the many things that Rick Pitino did not understand about the NBA, Tim Duncan was by no means a lock to wear the green in 1997).

They were in fact a playoff team this year, albeit clearly the worst playoff team in the league ... quite possibly one of the least imposing playoff teams ever. Plus they will finally now be out from under Grant Hill's enormous contract, which will allow The new Kid some free agent signing opportunities.

So as these things go, the Magic right now is probably the best NBA opportunity Donovan was likely to see. And maybe he figured where is there to go from the top of the heap he had been standing on? Would he ever win back-to-back ... to back in Gainesville?

No.

So jump from the top of the heap to the pile of cash now, and when it goes south in a couple (or even a few) years, he'll have his pick of college openings to walk back into.

Of course as Slick Rick could tell him, he will be walking back into a different situation. But even Florida 2007 is not on nearly the same level of cruise control as Kentucky 1997. Pitino walked away from annual title contention. Billy walked away from what will always be a football school.

Is The Constitution The Problem?

2007-05-29T10:50:00.000-05:00

Recently finished Politics: Observations and Arguments by the great New Yorker columnist Hendrick Hertzberg.

While the book consists of a compendium of columns written in many publications over the course of almost 40 years, certain themes find their way back over and over. One of the most striking is the idea that we owe it to ourselves to continually take a critical look at the core of our political system. Equally striking is the idea that as a nation we seem to be structurally (constitutionally, even?) incapable of taking even that step of self-examination.

First, we need to be able to look critically at the how the Constitution shapes our system. The basic problem is:

The more thoughtful critics of the system of government chartered by the Constitution point to two great flaws in it (which some regard as its greatest virtues): it is weak, and it is unrepresentative. ... The weakness is endemic and is probably ineradicable. Weakness is a function of the separation of powers... Unrepresentativeness is another story.

The unrepresentativeness is tied up in two bedrock constitutional mechanisms -- purely geographical representation in Congress and the use of the Electoral College to select the President. Hertzberg argues that both mechanisms are archaic and have outgrown their initial purposes and utility. So why do we still have them?

Well, because the second recurring theme is that there never seems to be any real chance that any meaningful change is likely to happen. Although there is every indication that the framers expected constitutional revision to be ongoing, 220 years of expreience have shown that the structural impediments to change are deeply imbedded within the document itself.

Because amending the Constitution is both difficult and dangerous, it has been only done three times on a large scale: before the mold had set (the Bill of Rights); after it had been smashed by civil war (the Reconstruction amendments); and at Progressivism's high tide (direct election of senators, the income tax, women's suffrage).

With the exception of the election of senators and the amendments to widen suffrage, none have dealt with the unrepresentativeness of the current election processes, and it is unlikely that any ever will. The hurdles in the way of amendments are too high, and the interests concerned with keeping the status quo are too powerful (although given the hurdles, they don't even have to be very powerful, mostly just interested enough).

The result?

The third theme that, like it or not, there are consequences for this inability to make significant changes.

On the one hand we've now wound up with a Congress that is essentially self-perpetuating. Incumbents can gerrymander the map of geographic districts to the point where we have elections in which less that 10% of House elections are even reasonably competitive. So a public which has been desparate for meaningful ways to show displeasure with the President's Iraq fiasco have watched that desire stymied all the way up to last week's capitulation (essentially) to Bush's desire to avoid accountability for himself and the Iraq "government."

Of course, the fact that this person is indeed the current occupant of the White House is due entirely to the persistence of the electoral college quirk in the Constitution (although as Hertzberg pointed out in December, 2000:

On the basis of the available evidence -- not least the ruthless determination of the Republican Party to use all the powers at its command, from the executive and legislative branches of the Florida state government to the five-person Supreme Court bloc (now exposed not as jurisprudential conservatives but as ideological and nakedly partisan ones), for the single purpose of preventing a fair count of the ballots of Florida's citizens -- it may now be inferred, pending the eventual recount by scholars and journalists udner Florida's freedom-of-information laws, that the president-elect (a suddenly Orwellian honorific) lost not only the popular but also the true electoral vote. Nevertheless, the election of 2000 was not stolen. Stealing, after all, is illegal, and, by definition, nothing the justices of the Supreme Court do can be outside the law. They are the law. The election was not stolen. It was expropriated.)

Without the electoral college of course, the entire fiasco would not have been necessary. Gore would have won by a much wider margin than either Kennedy in 1960 or Nixon in 1968.

Without the electoral college, maybe we still would have had an administration that consistently combined a startling degree of arrogance with a shocking amount of incompetence in fighting terrorism, in developing a coherent foreign policy, in the fair administration of justice, in showing respect for the environment, in developing an alternative energy policy, in showing concern for the future fiscal well-being of the country, in dealing with natural disasters, and in having an interest in the "Christian values" that Christ actually made mention of.

But maybe not.

Sometimes these dry-as-dust issues do have consequences.

3 In, 3 Out

2007-05-24T12:07:00.000-05:00

King Kaufman makes a possibly obvious but nonetheless important point in his recap of yesterday's European Cup final in Athens.

The first goal of the game, on a deflection by Filippo Inzaghi of a free kick by Andrea Pirlo in the last minute of the first half, got me thinking about a column the other day by Nick Canepa of the San Diego Union-Tribune in which he gave a rundown of "The 10 worst things in sports."

It got me thinking about what some of the best things in sports are. I'd have to give it some thought to come up with a list. Hey, I'm told you readers love lists, so maybe you can chime in with your ideas. We'll write some future column together, and I'll collect the paycheck! OK? OK!

But one of those best things in sports has to be the first goal of a big soccer match. Is it possible for human beings to be any happier than, for example, Milan's fans, not to mention the players, were Wednesday after Inzaghi shouldered that ball home? To say the fans were delirious would be like saying that crowd in Times Square was mildly pleased with the end of World War II.

I think I know exactly what he means, but particularly from the other team's point of view. In recent months I've become something of a fan of the English Premier League, and so it was with at least a small amount of rooting interest (for Liverpool) that I sat down yesterday to watch a TIVOed version of the game (unlike any other sport, watching a TIVOed soccer game is possible, since unless I actively search it out there is no chance of seeing or hearing the outcome).

Liverpool looked to have the edge through most of the first half, controlling the play and outshooting Milan. But as will happen, one mistake had a huge cost. A foul just outside the box gave Milan a free kick which was shouldered in for the first goal.

That goal had exactly the effect that Kaufman discusses, as well as to effect of a feeling of dread that the Reds suddenly faced a giant hill. That first goal in a game at this level truly does completely change the literal feel of the game. In the blink of an eye, it goes from taut to desperate. A sense of desperation that eventually gave way to reality as Liverpool became the third of the three EPL semifinalists to go down.

Fightin' Crime, Remembering Nothin'

2007-05-15T08:47:00.000-05:00

I know that Col. McCormick isn't there anymore, but if the continuing embarassment that is the Attorney General of the United States starts engendering editorials like this even in the Chicago Tribune, then you can bet that he's got something of a credibility problem.

Not that the brain-dead "Number 1 Crimefighter" would even notice.

At a hearing last week before the House Judiciary Committee, he evaded precise answers and professed a poor memory, while insisting that the decision to sack the prosecutors was utterly sound. The apparent administration hope is that by denying and stonewalling, Gonzales can not only save his job but eventually exhaust all interest in the matter.

This is not good enough. Serious charges have been leveled that undermine public confidence in federal law enforcement, and they have not been convincingly rebutted. To continue to try to shrug off the issue will only deepen suspicions that this administration has taken justice out of the Justice Department. ...

Because of these developments, public trust in the department is in serious jeopardy. The president and the attorney general now have the burden of demonstrating that the administration acted properly in this episode. So far, they show no sign of being able to.

The Music Biz: 2007

2007-05-13T19:19:00.000-05:00

Great article by Clive Thompson in today's NY Times Magazine about the changing economics and sociology of the music business in the age of the internets.

The focus of the article is Brooklyn's own Jonathan Coulton (although the tale of OK Go's viral video dance explosion and the Hold Steady's bar band über alles story are examined as well).

While the accounting details of how he makes a living with no label, no publicity machine and no radio airplay (outside of the odd NPR story or appearance -- does that even count as radio airplay?) are interesting...

By the middle of last year, his project had attracted a sizable audience. More than 3,000 people, on average, were visiting his site every day, and his most popular songs were being downloaded as many as 500,000 times; he was making what he described as “a reasonable middle-class living” — between $3,000 and $5,000 a month — by selling CDs and digital downloads of his work on iTunes and on his own site.

...as are the retail aspects of his self-marketing approach...

his fans do not want merely to buy his music. They want to be his friend. And that means they want to interact with him all day long online. They pore over his blog entries, commenting with sympathy and support every time he recounts the difficulty of writing a song. They send e-mail messages, dozens a day, ranging from simple mash notes of the “you rock!” variety to starkly emotional letters, including one by a man who described singing one of Coulton’s love songs to his 6-month-old infant during her heart surgery. Coulton responds to every letter, though as the e-mail volume has grown to as many as 100 messages a day, his replies have grown more and more terse, to the point where he’s now feeling guilty about being rude.

...what was most interesting to me was the way his webcentric career has allowed him to geomarket his real potential money-maker -- his live shows.

When he performs, he upends the traditional logic of touring. Normally, a new Brooklyn-based artist like him would trek around the Northeast in grim circles, visiting and revisiting cities like Boston and New York and Chicago in order to slowly build an audience — playing for 3 people the first time, then 10, then (if he got lucky) 50. But Coulton realized he could simply poll his existing online audience members, find out where they lived and stage a tactical strike on any town with more than 100 fans, the point at which he’d be likely to make $1,000 for a concert. It is a flash-mob approach to touring: he parachutes into out-of-the-way towns like Ardmore, Pa., where he recently played to a sold-out club of 140.

As long as you're willing to overlook the fact that the song may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive listeners, check out Coulton's paean to the sun-kissed carnal delights of the First of May.

Also, Coulton provided the music to a series of John Hodgman's Little Grey Book Lecture podcasts that are musts for your listening device and can be downloaded here.

Frepublicans

2007-05-10T13:00:00.000-05:00

More spot-on commentary from Steve Chapman in today's Tribune.

He questions the bona-fides of the current Republican leadership (up to and including the Current Occupant), who can't even recognize their collective blindspot regarding the ongoing disaster in Iraq.

...when it comes to Iraq, Republicans insist we should be ready to pay any price in pursuit of a victory that has eluded us for so long. In their view, weighing the costs against the benefits, or acknowledging that we don't have a formula for success, is tantamount to appeasement.

What Republicans stood for in the past was a sober realism about the limits of our power and our good intentions. That spirit is absent today. They act as though slogans are a substitute for strategy. What they claim as steadfast resolve looks like blind obstinacy.

It's silly to say victory is the only option unless you actually have a way to achieve it and are willing to commit the necessary resources. The administration and its allies on Capitol Hill insist that this time, they know what they're doing. But they said the same thing at every point along the way, and if they had been right, the phrase "Mission Accomplished" wouldn't be a national joke.

Not So Disturbing...Disturbing

2007-05-09T16:11:00.000-05:00

Just finished watching a couple of movies which really don't seem to have much in common -- except for a rather apparent desire to shock and disturb their viewers.

The first was Se7en, a 1995 serial killer tale directed by David Fincher. I seem to have a thing for coming upon Fincher's movies rather late. I didn't see Fight Club until earlier this year, and I still haven't seen Zodiac.

Fincher, for his part, seems to have a thing for mass murderers, moving from this one, through Fight Club and on to Zodiac.

In a nutshell, just in case there is anyone in the world besides me who has yet to see this movie, Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt play a pair of mismatched homicide detectives on the trail of a serial-killing Kevin Spacey.

Spacey's character's conceit -- well, hell he's got plenty of those, starting with his nom de meurtre of "John Doe" -- is his desire to show the world in general and the city in particular (New York? Philly? Seattle? who knows -- any city where it consistently pours, even while the sun is shining) the errors of its ways by highlighting the particular sins of his seven (five? six? eight?) whackees.

In the end it seems as though John Doe's allusions of grandeur are really little more than the delusions of grandeur that Pitt's character dismissively labels them. In spite of Gwyneth Paltrow's unfortunate separation (and really, who didn't see that coming?), John Doe's blaze of glory hardly seems destined to light the fuse that will embolden all of society to clean up its act -- murderously, if need be.

Se7en appears to have pretentions of commentary on all sorts of societal ills, as well as cinematic allusions to most of the classics with which John Doe is obsessed. Shakespeare was probably the most apropos classicist, however, w/r/t this one -- "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

It does look great, though, as is seemingly true of most of Fincher's movies (I say seemingly because Zodiac looks to be the best looking of them all, but, well, you know).

Then there's The Bridge.

Where Se7en desperately wants to display a disturbing side of life, The Bridge, inspired by a brilliant 2003 New Yorker article called "Jumpers," truly does. It is a documentary rumination on life, those who choose on their own to end it, and those they leave behind, all the while using the Golden Gate Bridge as the world's largest and most beautiful scrim.

The great bridge seems to tower over and within the psyches of the troubled residents of The City (and probably all of its other residents as well). Small wonder, as it is a thing -- in its combination of design, color, setting, ingenuity, size and sheer audacity -- unlike anything else made by man.

There are moments in this film, in keeping with its backdrop, that are quite literally breathtaking, when I gasped in shock. Were those moments, and indeed the film as a whole, exploitative? Possibly. Quite probably, in fact.

But the examination of how the individual and the infrastructure combine in a moment comprised equally of beauty and despair make it a true piece of art -- a thing that makes you look at the world through different eyes -- like the bridge itself.

The Bridge may well be worth hating, but it is absolutely worth seeing.

MPLS...Again

2007-04-23T19:38:00.000-05:00

Followed up on last month's volleyball trip to Indy with a return trip to Minneapolis.

This time we roosted at the fully-kitchened TownePlace Suites in the fabulously gentrified Warehouse District.

Cait's team opened their first round on Friday afternoon, which left Friday morning for a sweet run down by the river.

Well, sweet for me, anyway. For Noreen, not so much. For her it was an unfortunate dust-up with a rocky protuberance that left her with a nasty gash on her knee and a trip to the Hennepin County Medical Center.

A mere six hours or so later, she was stitched up good as new -- or stitched up anyway.

It was unfortunate timing in many respects -- as well as damn painful -- but most unfortunate because she missed seeing Cait's team taking three games to win Pool 16CP32.

The next day's matches were in the morning, which was good, but didn't turn out quite so well -- 1-2 this time.

Later that day left some time for a little sightseeing and picture-taking back down by the Father of Waters.

And then dinner with the team and the other 'rents at Lyon's Pub on Sixth Street. The fish & chips pretty much sucked, but the beers were good, and that's not nothing.

Sunday was the unfortunate finale -- but the 4-3 weekend was good enough for a Top 40 Finish (out of 122 teams in their division), which wasn't half bad.

1922-2007

2007-04-12T07:42:00.000-05:00

He was sitting on a rock. He was barefoot. His feet were frosty with ice-nine. His only garment was a white bedspread with blue tufts. The tufts said Casa Mona. He took no note of our arrival. In one hand was a pencil. In the other was paper.

"Bokonon?"

"Yes?"

"May I ask what you're thinking?"

"I am thinking, young man, about the final sentence for The Books of Bokonon. The time for the final sentence has come."

"Any luck?"

He shrugged and handed me a piece of paper. This is what I read:

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity, and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

R.I.P., Kurt Vonnegut.

The Real Problem

2007-04-12T06:10:00.000-05:00

Slate's Dahlia Litwick conflates the Duke rape case and the Federal Prosecutors case in order to point out the real significance of the White House's cynical attempt to politicize the U.S. Attorney's offices.

It's easy to be distracted, even slightly amused, by the banal office shenanigans that make up the day-to-day coverage of the scandal. Increasingly, the Justice Department is revealed in all its wacky Dunder Mifflin glory. Alberto Gonzales is unmasked as The Office's Michael Scott—in so far over his head that he has no idea what his youthful employees are up to. With our daily focus on who was e-mailing whom and who was spending what on their fancy investitures, it's tempting to dismiss senior Justice Department staff ranking U.S. attorneys for their "loyalty" to the president as sophomoric. The Duke case is a useful reminder that the little plastic game cards being shuffled around and swapped by Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling were, in fact, loaded weapons.

Federal prosecutors, like state district attorneys, have tremendous power and almost limitless discretion to launch investigations, to subpoena, to file charges, to question witnesses, and to drop charges when the facts don't bear them out. And if the Duke case reminds us of anything, it's that the innocent targets of such investigations and indictments have only one power: to wait it all out and hope for the best.

When politics are injected into these individual prosecutions—when officials have one eye on the law and the other on mollifying either the party bosses or local voters—it's a certainty that justice will be lost in the shuffle.

Another Final Four

2007-04-11T18:42:00.000-05:00

If one conference were to get three teams into the Final Four (I think that the '85 Big East was the only one that managed to do it) you'd probably say that it was a pretty damn good conference.

In that case, the English Premier League must be one pretty damn good soccer league.

Liverpool's 1-0 win over PSV Eindhoven today at Anfield made it three of the four European Champions League semifinalists from the EPL.

Yesterday, Michael Essian's late goal brought Chelsea into the final four (and a date later this month with Liverpool).

Most impressive of all, though, was Manchester United's breathtaking 7-1 dismantling of Roma at Old Trafford yesterday. Doubles by Cristiano Ronaldo and Michael Carrick highlighted the Reds' destruction of the Italians.

ManU has led the EPL all season, and a win this month against AC Milan will give them a chance to prove it against one or the other of their most hated enemies. Bloody 'ell!

Disturbing Story

2007-04-11T07:01:00.000-05:00

From AOL Sports:

"Britney Spears could soon be getting up to some "lanky panky" with a 6ft 8in basketball player.

The pop princess is set to go out on a date with LA Lakers star Luke Walton. And his pals say they will be perfect partners – because Britney, 25, is fresh out of rehab and Luke, 27, is on the wagon during his team's run-in to the NBA play-offs.

"His people and her people are trying to thrash out a date when they can have a bite to eat and then we'll see what happens."

The disturbing part is not the use of "lanky panky" -- OK, that's pretty disturbing too -- but the idea that Luke Walton has "people."

Should Luke Walton have "people?"

Cool Brittania

2007-04-09T19:00:00.000-05:00

If you have BBC America on your cable system -- and I have no idea how many cable systems actually carry it -- you must do yourself the favor of watching "Live Forever."

It's a recounting of the Britpop years of the mid-90s in England.

While it's entirely possible that the movie misses a lot -- well, it does miss a lot: we barely get one-second glimpses of Radiohead and Elastica, for instance, and if there was any mention of Portishead at all then I sure missed it -- but if you want to know about three bands in 13 letters (BlurPulpOasis) then this one is pretty good. In particular, lots of chat with Damon and Jarvis and Noel and Liam.

Jarvis is a complete treat to hear from: cleverly and wittily British. Damon is crustily and huskily British. Noel is self-aggrandizing and self-obsessed. Liam is ... well, Liam is a bit of a dolt now, i'nt 'e?

Teenage Riot

2007-04-08T11:40:00.000-05:00

I've just always loved this video (and song), that's all.

Head Fanatic In Charge

2007-04-07T09:40:00.000-05:00

Well, in the end I think that UK probably got the right guy.

I never thought that there was any chance that Billy Donovan would jump. I was rather surprised at the amount of national MSM that thought he would jump. Then I was rather surprised at the amount of national MSM that considered his decision to stay in Gainesville to be some sort of indication of Kentucky's status decline. Did they really imagine that any other CBk job in the country could get Billy to even consider the jump?

Then I was overjoyed that the choice wasn't Rick Barnes.

And in the end, one of the world's most fanatic basketball fanbases -- I say one of, if only because there haven't been (to date anyway) any coaches murdered -- seems to have caught one of the world's most fanatic basketball coaches.

While that may be bad for the psychological treatment of those with certain predispositions, it's quite possible that it may be just as bad for the long-term outlook of the other coaches in the SEC East -- and that certainly does include Billy Donovan. While his NCAA record with Brewer, Horford, Green & Noah in uniform (listed in order of their importance and in reverse order of their capacity for annoyance) is a sterling 13-1, his record without them is a more pedestrian 9-6 -- and they will not be playing in blue and orange next year (unless they wind up in Charlotte, I guess). Also don't forget that Billy D. lost his last seven tilts against UK before those four showed up on campus, so it's entirely possible that the recent Gator-chomping has had as much to do with them as with Billy The Kid.

At the end of the day, Kentucky is the only SEC school (with the possible exception of Vanderbilt) that places basketball on a higher shelf than football. Add a coach who's even more obsessed that Billy D. to the tradition of the program, and you just might find things returning to normal in the SEC within a couple of years.

Reds

2007-04-06T18:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I watched a 25-year-old, 3-1/2 hour long movie about an American Bolshevik who has been dead for nearly a century.

Reds.

Any chance a movie like this could get made today? Not much more chance than you would have of finding an American Bolshevik today.

But the fact is, the movie -- recently released in a 25th Anniversary DVD edition -- is by no means some sort of leftist diatribe. What makes it seem faintly anachronistic in this day and age is actually its mere willingness to examine lefty political thought as a matter worthy of examination. It does throw into sharp relief the degree to which any mainstream political discussion seems rooted in either a defense or assault on the personalities involved -- as though any underlying theoretical political position is not up for discussion. Everything is up for discussion in the world of the movie's characters (sometimes ad nauseum), and everything is discussed.

Reactions to a movie that I haven't seen for 25 years? Chiefly, whatever happened to Diane Keaton? While I know that the answer is that Hollywood doesn't have much to do with or for 61 year-old actresses, and that she's basically lucky to get work at all, it is just a damn shame that such a great actress is wasted playing the same role over and over and over. She is absolutely brilliant in Reds, the true center of the movie even when she isn't given a whole lot more to do than react to Warren Beatty's lead. I'm not sure that there has ever been a more expressive actress than Keaton in her prime, and this is her prime.

#9?

2007-04-05T07:49:00.000-05:00

Remarkable list -- how would you even know about this many commericals, let alone have the patience to put the list together? -- but after all that, how do you blow it by then putting the best commercial (period!) of all time at #9?

Actual Top 3?

Number 3

Number 2

Number 1

Seriously, if you can watch that clip without grinning you might as well go get in the box right now.

Indy

2007-04-01T18:02:00.000-05:00

Freshly returned from a trip to Lexington and Indianapolis.

In Lexington to see the 'rents and sibs, there is the rumor mill surrounding the hoped-for second coming of Billy Donovan, and there is the news of the continuing mess in Iraq, the funding of the mess in Washington, the Attorney General mess in Washington, and the rest of the world's news.

One is important, the rest is just fluff -- and you know which is which.

Thursday it was on to Indianapolis for Cait's club team's volleyball tournament. First time to spend any time in the Circle City, but here it is in a nutshell: Indianapolis is the perfect city for people who don't like cities.

A truly odd cross between indoor/outdoor mall and the world's biggest county seat -- the weekend driving the circuit around Monument Circle is little different from the lineup around the the courthouse square in Harrisburg, the place does have itself situated as just about the perfect place for a tournament featuring hundreds and hundreds of teenage girls, their volleyball teams and their families. Hotels and national-chain restaurants aplenty are found within easy walking distance of the convention center location.

While the actual volleyball didn't go so well for TSA 16-1 Green, Cait's team did get a chance to play inside the RCA Dome on the very ground upon which Peyton Manning trods (well, anyway on a rubberized plastic court snapped together and placed on top of the very ground upon which Peyton Manning trods) -- twice.

The Ruins Of Detroit

2007-03-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

A recent Metafilter thread on the dismal state of Detroit includes a link to one of the great websites out there: The Ruins Of Detroit.

The story in pictures of the slow and steady death of a city.

In particular:

The Michigan Central Terminal

Fisher Body Plant 21

Trumbull Ave. Mansions

Many more. Check it out.

Sirius-ly

2007-03-24T11:58:00.000-05:00

I'm always a couple of weeks behind reading The New Yorker, so I only now got around to reading James Surowiecki's analysis of the proposed satellite radio merger between Sirius and XM. Great analysis of why it wouldn't be anti-competitive to allow the merger (due to the real scope of the competitive field for the merged company).

For myself, I do hope it goes through, as I feel it would make better one of the great things in the world right now. I've always loved radio. One of my favorite memories as a kid was listening in bed, through a pillow speaker, to the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre.

I love all kinds of radio -- music, sports, news, you name it. What makes Sirius great is that it is all those wrapped into one -- along with, of course, the indispensable Howard Stern. About 120 channels of everything under the sun. Now that I have it I wouldn't want to be without it.

It seems to me that merging the companies would only serve to stabilize what has been a financially precarious proposition -- while only adding value to what is already a value-rich medium.

Of course, given the highest-bidder state of politics in this country, there is no way it gets a fair shake.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which represents commercial radio stations, has lobbied hard against the deal, arguing that XM and Sirius compete only with each other. But the very fact that broadcasters are fighting the merger demonstrates that they view Sirius and XM as a threat. Similarly, for fifteen years AM/FM stations have done everything they could to cripple satellite radio, lobbying the F.C.C. to stop its roll-out in the nineteen-nineties and persistently trying to limit the types of programming XM and Sirius can carry.

It seems pretty clear, in the end, that the narrow interests of the NAB will probably win out over the wider interests of consumers, and federal regulators will probably kill this deal.

Too bad.

A New Look? You Bet Your Sweet Ass It Will Be

2007-03-24T09:44:00.000-05:00

Not much news out of Lexington over the past couple of days.

Coach flees to Minnesota (Minnesota?). Best player flees to the Knicks (the Knicks?).

All of which leaves the next 12 months or so in a serious, serious state of flux.

First of all, Tubby leaving, while unexpected, is not a shock (although jumping to coach the Gophers really is). All signs pointed to Tubby staying, but being given an ultimatum to clean house in the staff office. Due to not wanting to do that (out of loyalty), and probably also due to a general lack of further desire to put with an atmosphere such as was seen the last two years -- and make no mistake, it would only be worse next year -- he decided to step off.

Truth be told, ten years is probably enough for what has to be the most scrutinized (and, to be fair, best paid) job in college basketball. I won't recount the stats, but aside from the lack of a Final Four team in the last nine of the ten years, and a couple of duff outfits the last two years, it has been a very, very good run. Featured in it has been a pretty thorough domination of the Southeastern Conference (again, until the last two years).

MSWM opinion has been fairly unified in the opinion that this is probably a good deal for all involved. Minnesota gains some credibility and some positive notoriety for a change; Tubby, while taking a pay cut, is still pretty damn well compensated ($1.8 mil per year); and Kentucky gets some fresh blood and a chance to reverse the downward trend of the last couple of years (after the likely continuation of that trend next year, however).

Names of future coaching possibilities abound, but the name at the top of everyone's list may well be the toughest get: Billy Donovan. Billy D was an assistant in Lexington for 7 years with Rick Pitino, and he does seem the likeliest to get the Cats back near the top of the national heap. Personally, while he's at the top of my list as well, I'm extremely skeptical of the odds that he can be pried out of the situation he's built in Gainesville. Can you see him walking away from back-to-back NCs (should that still extant possibility come to pass)? Me neither.

Perhaps next on the list is John Calipari, although his perceived baggage may make him less attractive the longer you look at him.

Beyond that, Billy Gillespie, Tom Crean and Mark Few seem to be the hot names of those who would jump at the job. My personal favorite, though, would be Jay Wright, the current Villanova coach. He's got a track record at a major conference school, but he's still young enough to put a personal and long-term stamp on the progam. Perhaps most importantly, he's been the top guy at a major conference school in a major market. While the scrutiny at Villanova can't match that waiting in Lexington, fans and press don't come much tougher than in Philly, and his experience will at least put him in a better position than would facing the nay-sayers in Milwaukee, Spokane or College Station.

In any case, we may not see anything certain come about until the Gators are done -- either this weekend or next. No way anything is offered to anyone else before Billy D turns it down -- and he doesn't seem inclined to make a decision either way until his current team is finished. One more reason to root for the Ducks tomorrow.

Back 2 Back!

2007-03-15T19:44:00.000-05:00

Last year it was a little bit of a surprise.

This year it was anything but.

For the second straight year Tess' Prairie Middle School team took the conference volleyball crown. Last year's 7th grade team came out of the 3rd seed. This year's 8th grade version came on the heels of a 15-2 regular season, a regular season title and a Number 1 tournament seed.

A dominating regular season followed by a dominating performance in the tournament.

Another great job by Tess and the Fillies -- kudos once again, girls!

The Real Deal

2007-03-15T07:28:00.000-05:00

Hate to say it on the eve of March Madness, but this college basketball season has been pretty dreadful.

Kentucky and Illinois have had mediocre-at-best seasons. The Big Eleven is really, really...really awful -- to the point that if they had only taken two teams in the tournament I wouldn't have even batted an eye.

But last night brought a glimpse of some basketball really worth looking at, and looking forward to.

Suns 129, Mavs 127 in Double OT.

It may only be the Western Conference Final, but should this series come about as it should, it has all the earmarks of the best basketball series since the Lakers/Celtics or Celtics/Sixers rivalries in the early '80s.

Can't wait.

Concertapalooza

2007-03-14T07:59:00.000-05:00

Saturday made for four concerts in ten days. Not a record or anything but a lot for me. Couple away, couple at home. Couple of classical, a classic rock, and a real classic.

First up, on Feb. 28, was the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. Kurt Masur returned to lead the band in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony. The dynamics in the third and fourth movements were just outstanding, as was the brass throughout. Utterly beautiful ending to one of the most moving symphonies ever written.

The soloist, Sergey Khachatryan, played Sibelius' violin concerto. The opener was Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture.

The next night it was Martha Argerich and the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Argerich was in fine form, as you might expect from one of the great pianists of all time, playing Beethoven's 2nd Concerto beautifully (0f course). The orchestra finished up with Scheherazade.

Next up, last Monday, was The Who at the Sears Centre (sic). Sears Centre (sic) good: just about 5 miles door to door. Sears Centre (sic) bad: just about 40 minutes to cover the ground (both ways) because of the insanely bad parking situation.

The Tragically Hip opened the show, and I was very psyched to see them. Unfortunately, I spent all but their last three songs trying to get the car parked and get into the arena.

The most noticeable thing about the crowd? Their age. And not in a good way. Talk about an aging baby boomer special, the average age may have been less than that of the band (at least the original two), but not by much. Live at Leeds, the crowd was long in the hair. Live at Sears Centre (sic), just long in the tooth.

The music, though, was all you could ask for at this point in their careers. While the background screen show of mod-era pics during "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" definitely made me wish I could have seen that band, the one on the Sears Centre (sic) stage was pretty damn good as well.

Townshend was in fine windmilling form, with a few hops thrown in for good measure. Daltrey spun his retro mike cord like the days of yore, and even managed to hit some of the old high notes as well. But the key to the real Who was always Keith Moon's frenetic lead drumming. Zak Starkey (aka Ringo's boy) filled the toasty seat of the long-mouldering Moonie, and filled it pretty admirably.

The show's highlight moment? Had to be the most improbable moment as well. If you had asked me going in for the one thing I'd be least likely to hear, I would have said the singing scream after the synth solo on "Won't Get Fooled Again." Well, the moment came, and the high note was screamed just as you would have hoped.

The closer was last Saturday night, Smoking Popes at Durty Nellies. One-time Q101 phenoms, turned label rejects, turned Christian, turned Christian rockers, turned re-formed band, the Caterer brothers +1 got back together to play Metro and Lollapalooza last year and are now on something of a mini-tour.

The show was, basically, a total love-fest. One of those shows where the singer can sing way off mike for a while because everyone in the room is singing at the top of their lungs all the time anyway. Josh Caterer did this very thing a couple of times, and that was fine but the crowd's singing is no replacement for one of the truly distinctive instruments in rock music.

It took a while for the board guy to figure it out and get the mix right, but by the end of the set you could finally hear him sing and that is definitely worth hearing. The band was tight, the songs were melodic as hell, and the singing was absolutely ethereal.

Bliss.

The Final Four Of Everything

2007-03-13T07:36:00.000-05:00

Slate highlights one of the all-time great "Damn! I wish I'd thought of that!" ideas -- The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four Of Everything, in which all the great questions of life are reduced to brackets.

Really want to know your own mind on the question of the greatest movie deaths or greatest ad slogans? Now you can (btw, it's Bonnie & Clyde's violent demise and "Where's The Beef?").

Wow

2007-03-10T12:54:00.000-06:00

Well, for a coach who is under fire, the ending of yesterday's UK/Mississippi State game couldn't possibly have been any worse.

Up 3 with 5 seconds left to go in a game they had trailed by 14 points in the second half, with Jodie Meeks at the line to take a free throw to seal the deal (and make no mistake, the kid is pure money -- he would have made the shot), Tubby and Sheray Thomas combined for the single most brain-dead play in the recent history of Kentucky basketball.

Thomas left the lane, at Smith's urging, after the ball had been "handed" to Meeks resulting in a lane violation that gave the Bulldogs the ball down only 3. Even still, when Jamont Gordon took the inbounds pass 92 feet from the basket, there was plenty of time to let the clock dwindle a little then foul him and put him on the line.

Instead, the second-most brain-dead play in the recent history of Kentucky basketball transpired as nobody fouled Gordon and he (of course) drained a three at the buzzer to send the game into overtime.

To no one's surprise, the overtime came down to one last possession for the Cats, down 2, which they then proceed to botch without even getting a shot off -- something that has become a UK specialty in the past couple of years.

A day ago I felt certain that Tubby would be the coach of this team next year. Now, I'm honestly not so sure. This bizarre finish will certainly increase the pressure exponentially on both the coach and the administration, perhaps high enough that something will have to give. And for myself, I've always been a Tubby supporter (albeit grudgingly sometimes), but yesterday's debacle may have proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back for me as well.

The pertinent question I read yesterday was "when did the basketball team become the football team?", when did they become so adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? And how long can that be allowed to go on?

I do think that yesterday may well be a day when Tubby lost the confidence of a great deal of an enormous fan base -- a confidence that may never return.

Most of the recent sniping has rightly been placed on the recruiting misfires of the last few years. But if the man can't recruit or coach? -- well then putting someone else in the seat starts to look pretty damn attractive.

Well, at least I can enjoy the rest of the weekend without having to worry about how they will manage to screw things up again. This one will probably never be touched.

Second Season

2007-03-09T10:46:00.000-06:00

The Wildcats and the Illini both began their attempts to erase some memories of a misbegotten season yesterday -- both successfully, but not without some harrowing moments.

The Wildcat faithful seem to be culminating a month-long meltdown, a meltdown that has reached the ears of the ubiquitous national college basketball media. 20 wins, a winning conference record, a likely 16th-straight NCAA bid all result in ... a clamor to fire the coach.

Cooler heads will prevail, and Tubby Smith will the coach next year (albeit with some new faces in the suits near him on the bench), if only because firing him will only make things much, much worse (particularly in the aforementioned national media). What these so-called "dynasty defenders" can't seem to figure out is that there is no way the higher-ups at UK will take the PR hit that would come from firing the first and only black coach in the history of a program that has taken its share of racial PR hits in the past. Particularly one who has had as much success as Tubby, and without a lot of real problems (it's been several years since the last DUI arrest, for instance).

All of which leads back to the issue at hand, which is the current team and the current postseason. Back again in the previously unfamiliar position of playing in the SEC Tournament's opening round on Thursday, the Cats started slow then fed the big man (17 and 11 for Randolph Morris) on the way to beating a hobbled Alabama team spiraling it's way to an NIT bid.

A 12-point win wasn't the type of blowout that would allow the starters to get some rest for the hoped-for 4-games in 4-days trek, but at least it wasn't the sort of tight one that this team has made a habit of losing this year. What it did do was probably lock up an NCAA bid. With 20 wins against the toughest schedule in the country, there probably wasn't much doubt about that, but with 21 wins against that schedule there is no doubt.

A young but dangerous Mississippi State team is in today's quarterfinal future -- that an 8-8 conference record won them a share of the division title tells you all you need to know about this year's SEC West -- with Vandy or Arkansas awaiting a possible Semifinal on Saturday. At the moment, the Cats are looking at about an 8 seed, but every win this weekend may serve to nudge that up a bit further.

Here in Chicago, the newly Chief-less Fighting Illini (not that the Big Ten would ever allow Chief to get closer to the Big Ten Tournament than Stickney) also found themselves with an unfamiliar Thursday game against the lowly Nittany Lions. For a while, the Lions were just that, but a barrage of three-pointers and a spell of disinterestedness by the Illini lopped 10 points off of a 12-point lead in the last 10 minutes, and the Illini (and their fans) eventually had to sweat out a 6-point win that was much, much closer than that.

So it's on to Round 3 of the Weber/Sampson grudge match (sans handshakes again?) in tonight's final quarter, with Wisconsin likely awaiting the winner on Saturday.

The year has been at least as rough on Coach Weber as it has been on Coach Smith, with similarly unrequited grumblings of firing from segments of the fan base. In Bruce's case it hasn't only been the on-court problems, though there have been plenty of grumbles about that. The off-court issues have loomed even larger, led by the preseason and midseason driving mishaps of Richard McBride and Jamar Smith respectively. Smith's tequila-fueled February spin-out resulted in his suspension (and likely eviction) from the team, along with landing teammate Brian Carlwell in the hospital. A nice two-for-one that was exactly what this shaky team did not need.

Yesterday's win probably sealed a bid on Sunday, although less certainly than a loss would have served to unseal one. At the moment, a 9, 10 or 11 seed is a real possibility, making every win this weekend important, since a 9, 10 or 11 seed is not where you want to see yourself come Sunday afternoon.

In-A-Gadda-De-Jon-Scheyer-Face

2007-03-04T10:56:00.000-06:00

Grudge? What grudge?

Caruso. So Bad He's ... Really Bad.

2007-02-09T09:05:00.000-06:00

Into The Stretch

2007-02-03T09:16:00.000-06:00

Kentucky and Illinois make the turn into their February regular-season stretch runs today -- Cats in Fayetteville and Illini at home against the stinkin' Gophers.

What to say about each?

Kentucky is still a work in progress, alternately infuriating and enrapturing. After taking advantage of something of a scheduled break to win 11 straight, culminating with an 87-49 dismantling of South Carolina in Columbia on the WWL in S, they have now hit the mountain. Head on in the case of a second-straight home loss to a resurgent Vandy (who prior to last year had never beaten UK in Rupp Arena) and a dispiriting OT loss at Georgia after blowing a 17-point first half lead.

A home win over a hobbled and reeling Tennessee really answered no questions -- all of which remain as they tip off in Fayetteville this afternoon:

What has happened to Randolph Morris? After a string of dominating games, the last three have featured a return of foul trouble with a resultant timidity of play -- 10 points and 4 rebounds per game over the last three, and no offensive rebounds in the last two. The offense had been on a real uptick, mainly due to the evolving inside-outside combination of Morris and Joe Crawford. Crawford has continued his part of the bargain (19.5 ppg in conference play), but the Cats need both legs in order to move their typically misbegotten offense forward.
What happened to the defensive consistency? As with most of Tubby Smith's UK teams, this one will only go as far as its defensive consistency will take it. There is just not enough offensive firepower to outscore good teams. Their record in games when the opponent is held below 1 point per possession? 14-0. When the opponent scores better than 1 per? 2-5 (0-2 in conference games). Keep the opponent's offensive efficiency down, and there's still enough offense to win.
Is this the worst senior class in UK history? Probably, yes. The team right now consists of a junior core (Morris, Crawford, Ramel Bradley) getting a little help from the freshmen (some Jasper, a bit of Stevenson, but mostly Jodie Meeks), and next to nothing from the non-existent sophmore and head-shakingly awful senior classes. Sheray Thomas has actually contributed in some degree recently (7 boards and 5 assists against Tennessee), but Bobby Perry continues to produce nothing (38% shooting and 4 rpg from a starting power forward is as close to nothing as you can wring out of the position), and Lukasz Orbzut has responded to Morris' recent foul troubles by playing 8 minutes in the last 3 games. Not a good sign.

All of which makes today's game rather important. Caught in a mix with Georgia and Vandy a couple of games behind Florida, a loss to a member of the SEC's weaker sisters (no one in the SEC West even has a winning record in conference) would mean a complete loss of touch with the Gators. On the other hand, a road win at this point would be huge and enormously welcome.

As for the Illini, tonight's breather against Minnesota will bring them back to even in the Big 11. With a large number of very winnable games left on the schedule (6 of the last 7 by my count), 22 wins and 10-6 in the conference is still a possibility. That clearly will depend upon the defense coming to play every night, though, because this team is an offensive basket case -- as in unable to put the ball in one. With Jamar Smith's jumper gone AWOL and Brian Randle still hobbling, the offense has come down to what Shaun Pruitt can give them in the post (usually quite a bit) and what Chester Frazier can generate from pounding the dribble until the shot clock has gone under 5. As offensive strategies go, this latter is somewhat akin to waiting on the divine wind -- while it may take out a cruiser now and again it's no strategy to win the war.

Schrute...Dwight Schrute

2007-02-02T07:55:00.000-06:00

Via Life In The Office

Hertzberg

2007-02-01T06:23:00.000-06:00

The only thing wrong with Hendrik Hertzberg's "Talk Of The Town" pieces in The New Yorker is that they're only in every other issue. I always hate the disappointment of his off weeks. What's right with them, of course, is that they almost always eloquently develop thoughts that I completely agree with.

This week he's in with a piece on last week's State of the Union address (remember that?), and the follow-up from Sen. Jim Webb. Here's the shiniest nugget:

Between the veggies and Baby Einstein fell the shadow: Iraq. The President pointed to his “new strategy,” begged Congress and the country “to give it a chance to work,” and added, “Whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure.”

True, but not true enough. Last November, the voters didn’t endorse failure—they simply acknowledged it. And they certainly didn’t vote for escalation, which is what Bush is giving them. With this address, in conjunction with his January 10th “new way forward” speech, the President has taken full ownership of the Iraq war. Four years ago, many were complicit to one degree or another in the decision to invade, including a bipartisan majority in Congress and the governments of Britain and other members of the “coalition.” That is no longer so. The generals on the scene, who resisted Bush’s “surge,” have been removed. The Senate is on the point of passing a resolution of disapproval. The coalition is crumbling, and its British component is likely to ratchet itself down once Tony Blair leaves office. Senator John McCain, who a month ago passionately warned against a surge of fewer than thirty thousand troops, now supports a surge of twenty thousand—largely because, he says, the new American commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, thinks it has a chance of working. But Petraeus conceded, in testimony last Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that the new troop levels fall short of his own previous estimate of what would be necessary. Soldiers follow orders, and General Petraeus has his.

In a Saturday radio talk before the State of the Union address, the President said, “Those who refuse to give this plan a chance to work have an obligation to offer an alternative that has a better chance for success.” The day after the address, Vice-President Cheney—in an instantly notorious CNN interview in which he dismissed talk of blunders as “hogwash”—said, “The critics have not suggested a policy.” That is hogwash. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is in its fourth week of hearing such suggestions. The Iraq Study Group has a plan. Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb have a plan. The Center for American Progress has a plan. But what all their plans have in common is that they recognize that what remains is the search for the least bad of a bad bunch of options. Implicitly, they recognize that Bush’s policy—and, therefore, Bush—is a failure. And so, rather than looking for a policy that might be within our means and might mitigate the disaster, Bush is betting all his chips—all our chips—on the only choice that allows him the fantasy that in the end people will say: Bush was right. He is sending twenty thousand because twenty thousand is all he has. Next to nothing in the way of ground forces remains for other contingencies. His Presidency and his “legacy” are in ruins anyway, so he imagines he has nothing to lose. If only that were true of the rest of us.

The Greatest Of All Time

2007-01-18T14:09:00.000-06:00

Joe Frazier showed up on Howard Stern this morning. Noteworthy not for the interview -- although not in as bad a shape as Ali, Smokin' Joe is a difficult interview at best at this point and thousands of violent punches to the skull have taken their toll -- but for the memories evoked of "The Fight Of The (Last) Century."

March 8, 1971. Madison Square Garden.

Boxing in general, and heavyweight boxing in particular, hasn't been close to such a pinnacle since and will all but certainly continue the descent away from it into the future.

If there was ever a time and a place in the history of sports to which I would dearly love to time travel and be an eyewitness, this was it.

The Funniest Show on TV

2007-01-18T13:00:00.000-06:00

In case you hadn't noticed, The Office is no longer the funniest show on television.

Not that it's any less funny.

I had my doubts last May that the show would be able to pull off the difficult task of keeping things on track once the Jim & Pam romantic tension had been released.

I was wrong about that. By mixing in some new blood from the Stamford office -- then one by one giving all but Karen and Andy the boot (for now, anyway) -- the show has been able to keep all the balls in the air. The last three episodes in particular ("Benihana Christmas," "Back From Vacation," and "Sales Teams") have been comic genius.

Unbeknownst to our Scranton crew, however, a new show, set up the interstate in New York, has quietly lapped them.

30 Rock is now the funniest show on television.

It began life as a vehicle for Alec Baldwin's deadpan -- and it surely remains that. But it also became a vehicle for Tracy Morgan's insanity, Rachel Dratch's one-off cameos, and the most killer combination of subtle humor (the faux-Springsteen soundtrack accompanying Liz Lemon's bridge & tunnel boyfriend on screen was the moment I fully realized that something special was up here) and over-the-top larfs since the heyday of The Simpsons.

Last weeks episode, "The Rural Juror" was when the show finally hauled itself all the way to the top of the heap and planted its flag. The guy who posted this clip on YouTube had it right: "When 'Barbara Walters' said 'curly haired surfer named Roberta' I laughed so hard I almost coughed up blood."

More Of The Same

2007-01-13T10:04:00.000-06:00

We have now officially moved through the looking glass in Washington. Given the overwhelming message at the (voting) polls in November and in the (public opinion) polls since then (and long before then) that the American public has seen enough of George Bush’s Iraq fiasco, Dear Leader’s response this week was ... to escalate the war.

There can be little doubt at this point that 43’s place in history will be among the very worst Presidents that this nation has produced. His arrogance and incompetence seem to continue unabashed and unabated by the mess he has created through both his actions and his inactions.

Actions – Time will tell if this latest escalation will merely be a footnote in the larger tale, or if it will actively add to the morass, but can anyone legitimately argue at this point that it will certainly work? Or that there is even a reasonable likelihood that it will work? Even a growing chorus of Republican critics have their doubts.

The argument is that by adding troops into Baghdad a critical mass can be reached that will pacify the city, and thereby the country, and allow the political leadership in Iraq to gain a foothold and move the nation towards a political stasis and then towards the beacon of democracy that Dear Leader has always envisioned.

Is it even necessary to poke holes in that argument? Or is it completely self-deflating? First, 20,000 additional troops (and bear in mind that these are not “new” troops – any increase is made up of extending the deployment of troops in country or accelerating the redeployment of troops which had been rotated out for refitting – there are no “new” troops available to send in) are merely a fraction of the number necessary to do what is being proposed ( remember that the original numbers bandied about were in the 50-70K range – still too few at that).

Second, if the pacification of Baghdad should by some miracle be successful, previous attempts at this sort of thing (don’t be fooled by the “New” in “New Way Forward,” there is nothing new about this strategy) have shown that the evildoers will just move elsewhere in the country and either do evil there or bide their time before drifting back into Baghdad. Pacifying the city will roil the rest of the country and vice-versa. Short of an unattainably massive occupation force, the pacification horse is out of the barn.

Third, the execution of Saddam Hussein was just the latest indication that the nominal “political leadership” of Iraq is a joke. The Maliki government is a puppet all right, but 3,000+ dead and $350 billion+ spent hasn’t even bought us a puppet – he’s the puppet of Moktada al Sadr.

Inactions – The subtext underlying all of this fiasco-making in the Middle East is the time we continue to lose by trying to either dig out or dig deeper into the Iraq-sized hole. The greatest national security issue facing this nation is not new – in fact it is no different than it was when Gerald Ford put his finger on it in 1975. We are far too dependent upon the most volatile region in the world for too large a chunk of our energy needs. As long as we are so dependent on Middle East oil, we will never be able to step back from a region we don’t understand or otherwise care about. While we have wasted lives and treasure in Iraq, it may well turn out that the time we’ve wasted is even more valuable.

The Early Reads

2006-12-20T14:05:00.000-06:00

Kentucky and Illinois are both through a month and about a third of their seasons, and what can we say about the two squads?

How about too soon to tell.

Following wins over their respective biggest out-of-conference rivals (a 61-49 win by the Cats over Louisville on Saturday, a 73-70 win by the Illini over Missouri last night) Kentucky stands at 8-3, Illinois at 11-2.

Of the 5 losses, only the Illini's home loss to unranked Maryland could even remotely be considered a bad loss. Kentucky's 3 came against #1 UCLA and #18 Memphis in Maui, and #2 North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The other Illini loss was to #9 Arizona in Phoenix -- tantamount to a road game.

And yet the question marks for both still outweigh either the positives or the negatives.

While the Cats' wins have come against some OK comp (DePaul, Indiana, Louisville among others), they are 0-3 against ranked teams and have yet to post a real statement win. The 11 Illini victims have been mostly the little sisters of the poor. Prior to Mizzou, a narrow win over Bradley is their best, and their closest to a win over a major conference team (assuming the MVC is not a major conference, and that such distinctions matter anymore).

Kentucky has found one solid option, center Randolph Morris, who is averaging 16 points and 8 boards -- even after pulling a foul-induced donut against the Cards. Beyond that the only building certainty seems to be some terrific half-court defense. In the six games since making it back to the mainland, opponents have been shooting 32% from the floor, and a mere 24% from beyond the arc. The ability to force turnovers is still unproven (opponents are turning the ball over on a mere 19% of their possessions -- the lowest for a set of UK opponents since 1973-74) -- but if that does happen things could get very scary for opposing offenses.

More scary that it already is for the Cats' offense, hopefully. While some blips have been seen on the radar (e.g., Jodie Meeks' 18 vs. the 'Ville) no consistent second options (not to mention third or fourth) have yet to bubble up. As a result, this year's offensive production has been firmly stuck in neutral -- on a pace unseen since the Ford administration (the offensive points-per-possession is the lowest since 1976). While there's still time to turn that around, it won't get any easier once the cream of the SEC is guarding the ball.

The Illini have their share of question marks as well -- starting with who's suiting up. Three key players (Rich McBride, Jamar Smith and Brian Randall) have each missed multiple games through injury or suspension. As a result, the group that will will likely see the most floor time in the Big Ten has only found the floor in the last couple of games. While Smith seems to have hit the ground running (48% on his 3-pointers this year), Randall has been slowly working his way in (his 24 minutes against Mizzou are his high to date).

Both will be welcome full-timers to a rotation that has leaned heavily on Warren Carter and Shaun Pruitt, and found them both up to the task so far (25 points and 13 boards per game between them). A road tilt at Xavier next week may be one of their tougher remaining tasks, as an extremely favorable B-10 sked keeps them out of Columbus and Madison, while forcing the league's clear leaders to come to Champaign. Despite the serious doubts of Big Ten Wonk, there have to be reasons for optimism in Central Illinois.

The Wire

2006-12-12T15:43:00.000-06:00

In addition to proclaiming that "Rex Grossman is bad. I don't care if they're 10-2 [make that 11-2 now, Bill]. He's bad", Bill Simmons has some thoughts on the recently completed 4th season of "The Wire."

Speaking of Baltimore, after watching the season finale of "The Wire" this week, I wrote up an extended rant about the show and how much it means to me -- both as a writer and a human being -- and how I believe it's the most important show of my lifetime, how I can't remember being more attached to four TV characters than the four school kids from Season 4, how I simply can't fathom why more people wouldn't give it a chance ... but it ended up sounding too preachy, so I'm just going to say that it's my favorite TV show of all-time and leave it at that. Name another show that could peak during a season in which its best character (McNulty) basically disappeared for 12 of the 13 episodes? How is that possible? What a show. I miss it already.

Have to agree with that last sentence.

As I've said before, I've been aware of this show in the past, but never even bothered to take a look-see before this season. I guess I felt like one more cop show is something I could do without.

I could not have been more wrong -- on both counts.

It's hardly a cop show (or just a cop show, anyway), and it's hardly something I could do without.

What it is, in fact, is the Baltimore cop show equivalent of a Dickens novel. The whole of the city's life is examined, from the mayor's office down to the street corner. The thread that ties them together is the lack of control that any of the characters have over the course of their lives.

A longshot mayoral candidate is pushed over the top by exploiting the apparent murder of a state's witness, only to find out after the election that the "murder" was merely another random twist of fate, a misguided bullet from a nearby target shooter. Once ensconced in the office he sought in order to move the city in a better direction he finds a $50M time-bomb waiting for him, facing him almost instantly with a choice between either attempting to move up (to the statehouse) or out (no way he's going to be reelected to City Hall).

Even at that lofty level, the wheel turns mercilessly.

At the level of the school kids Simmons refers to, the fates are even more unpredictable and their effects even more unrelenting. By the end of the season, the opener's four relatively carefree boys of summer have been scattered in the wind and only one seems to have any hope of escaping a sorry fate.

I've read often about how this show has apparently failed to find an audience over the years it has been on HBO (Simmons alludes to this as well). I really have no idea whether this is the case or not, or if it matters or not since it's an HBO show. What I do know is this. Given my experience with the show, it is impossible to conceive of anyone watching this show and not becoming a slavish devotee of it.

I, for one, can't wait for the next (final, I'm told) season to begin.

Three Movies

2006-12-08T13:41:00.000-06:00

I've had a Netflix account for a few months now, but the last three movies I've received from them are maybe the most interesting I've seen so far. One I've seen before (although it's been too long), but the other two were new (and long overdue for a view).

The one I've seen before is The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola's intermezzo between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II -- and the first release in his annus mirabilis of 1974. The most amazing thing about this movie -- and there are a lot of amazing things about this movie -- is that Coppola had actually finished the screenplay in 1969, five years earlier. Amazing because it so perfectly captures the zeitgeist of 1974, a nation wrapped in the tight embrace of Watergate and all its revelations of secret tapings and eavesdropping ne'er do wells.

Consumed by paranoia, Gene Hackman's Harry Caul is still helpless when his paranoid fantasies come all too true. As a professional survellance specialist, Harry is used to silently cataloguing the lives of his targets. By the end of the movie he's become a tool in the service of larger conspiracies -- conspiracies by which he is now silently watched, listened to and engulfed.

The most paranoid of movies, made in the midst of the most paranoid of times, but its themes of secretive forces at work never seem to go completely out of style.

The second of the three was McCabe & Mrs. Miller, by the recently departed Robert Altman. Like The Conversation, it is a product of a time that is unlikely to ever be seen again -- the true golden age of Hollywood. From its beginning in 1967 with The Graduate, to its death in 1977 with Star Wars, those ten years saw a flowering of wide-release movies with the aim of actually speaking to adults. Just about every one of my very, very favorite movies were made during these 10 years, and the great ones from that period all share an ability to understand that humans are complex creatures, with a myriad of motivations to undertake any number of actions, and everything doesn't always turn out OK. These sorts of movies still get made, but they're a hell of lot harder to find, aren't they?

McCabe is a miniature tale -- man (Warren Beatty) comes to an outpost of 19th century Washington (the state) to build a new tavern & brothel. It becomes successful when a fiery British opium addict (Julie Christie) takes over as madam, leading to an offer by the railroad to buy him out. When he decides to try to jack up the price, they rescind the offer and send an Old West hit squad to take him out of the picture. In time they succeed, and we're left with the titular hero slowly expiring from his wounds and the cold in the middle of a mountain blizzard, while the madam hits the pipe in the local Chinatown.

Need a happy ending? Not in this Chinatown, either.

The third was a little more recent, although I'm probably the last one to see it.

Fight Club was released in 1999 -- and quite frankly it's hard to imagine some of its scenes of public mayhem being released by a major studio after 9/11. Its themes include the need for men to break free from the grip of women and materialism, and the way to do this is to have the crap beaten out of you. Beating the crap out of someone else is good, but the point of the fight club in Fight Club is to feel the pain. Eventually, this need to break the grip leads to the final solution of destroying all records of debt, leading to chaos and a more atavistic lifestyle.

Now, the thing is that hidden within that shit-pile of a plot are a hell of a lot of interesting thoughts and dialogue and acting (disclaimer -- yes, I am most definitely a Brad Pitt fan. I know this is an unpopular position, but there it is).

And then they decided to explain the plot.

Oh, man do I hate when they do that. Case in point was Vanilla Sky, a fine and nice little Cameron Crowe movie which had some interesting things to ponder and figure out...up until the moment that Noah Taylor is forced to describe the key to the entire plot because, well, you know, it might be too hard or interesting for us to figure out on our own. Kind of like that point in 2001 when HAL explains to Keir Dullea that the black monolith is actually a transmitter that indicates when man has evolved to the point where we're exploring the moon and ... what's that? He doesn't explain it? What did we do, figure it out on our own or something? Really? No way.

Anyway, in Fight Club the part of Noah Taylor is taken by both Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, but the idea is the same. Explain the key to the entire plot because, well, how else would we know?

Regardless, all three are worth watching, and The Conversation is worth watching (and listening to) again and again.

Over-rated (clap, clap, clap-clap-clap)

2006-12-06T10:10:00.000-06:00

The most eagerly anticipated document since the last Harry Potter book makes its arrival today in Washington.

The long-awaited Iraq Study Group's (aka, "Jimmy" Baker's) report hits the President's desk today, and in addition to the title of this post the appropriate football cheer might be "Too Little, Too Late."

Each and every befuddled Washington politician on both sides of the aisle has yearned for this deus ex machina to show them the way out of the intractable mess that has been made of both the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the U.S. foreign policy in the world's most dangerous region.

The Bush Administration's recent moves to dampen expectations for the report should be taken as an indication that this chunk of paper is not about to swoop down and make everything all right -- whether our deluded President chooses to implement its proposals (mmmm, not likely) or ignore them (mmmm, what do you think?).

It may well be that its recommendations to make the attempt to put this into a regional context (involve Iran and Syria, get back to trying to solve the Palestinian problem, etc.) are in fact the best of a range of bad choices to try to move forward out of this tar pit. But it sure seems unlikely that this President (and Vice, remember him?) is going to take any steps which will involve even the impression that mistakes have been made and need to be corrected.

Beyond that is the even more vexing question of whether a solution even exists which involves anything but eventual disaster for our position in the region. Is there, in fact, a way out of this that will even look like a win for our side?

Maize and Blue. Very Blue.

2006-12-05T15:55:00.000-06:00

Oddly enough, there are those who are upset about Michigan's football team playing in the Rose Bowl, rather than in the Mythical National Championship Game.

Or is that the National Mythical Championship Game?

Or does it matter, anyway?

At a national level, Gene Wojciechowski and Pat Forde seem to think so.

At a more parochial level, Mitch Albom and Bob Wojnowski really seem to think so.

Me? Not so much. Michigan had their chance to beat Ohio State and failed. Why give them a second chance rather than give Florida a first chance? No reason that I can think of.

In the dozen or so years since college football first started down the path of pretending to have a system for determining a "national champion" there have been a dozen or more teams that have made noises of getting jobbed, overlooked and/or hornswoggled.

Two really were, and neither is this year's Michigan team.

Penn State in 1994 was screwed by the fact that Joe Paterno rested his defensive regulars at the end of a blowout win over Indiana, and gave up a couple of late touchdown passes. That team didn't lose to anyone and wouldn't have lost to anyone that year, but Nebraska was given the "national championship." The fact that those two didn't actually play was probably the final straw that put us on the current track of pretending to have a system for determining a "national champion."

The other was the 2004 Auburn team that lost to no one all year, yet had to watch two other teams play for the "national championship." Now granted, both those teams (USC & Oklahoma) were also undefeated, and if Auburn had played instead the one that was left out would have been on this short list. But Auburn has an even greater right to make noise because one of those teams they were forced to watch (Oklahoma), got the crap kicked out of them by the other, 55-19.

I suspect that Auburn felt they could have done better.

Maybe Michigan will feel that way this year if Florida gets waxed in the Mythical National Championship Game. If so, well, they'll be in good historical company.

If Florida should win, of course ... well, I guess Michigan will have even more to bitch about, won't they?

Bald + Muttonchops = A Look

2006-10-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

Not necessarily a good look, really, but certainly a look.

Anyway, the wife loves this OK Go video. And when you stop and consider what must have gone into it (the choreography & what had to be hundreds of attempts -- the thing is one long take!) you've got to applaud the effort.

Two Openings

2006-09-21T09:14:00.000-05:00

Aaron Sorkin returned to NBC on Monday, with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, another ensemble show, set this time amongst the glitterati of network television.

(Yawn).

Is there anything less interesting to anyone outside the inner workings of network television than the inner workings of network television?

Now I'll be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for a whole host of reasons. Sports Night was a Sorkin-created show about the making of a TV show and it became one of my all-time favorites. The Sorkin-written years of The West Wing became my favorite TV drama ever -- the chief reason being Sorkin's writing, which took a step up even from Sports Night's tremendously high level.

But if the premiere is any indication, this one has a ways to go. While some old Sorkin favorites make the move (Bradley Whitford, Timothy Busfield, Felicity Huffman in a cameo), I really have to say that I have problems with a couple of the show's principals -- Matthew Perry and Amanda Peet.

I know Perry was a West Wing character for a few episodes, but I didn't think much of him there either. Bankable? Probably. Believeable? Nope.

And Amanda Peet as a network president? Really not believable. Amanda Peet as an actress? I don't know. I guess I expect an actor to have more than one facial expression.

On the other hand, The Wire recently opened its fourth season. Now I'm not going to claim that I've paid any attention at all to the first three seasons -- haven't watched an episode -- but the show has been getting all kinds of ridiculously great press lately, so I figured I'd give it a try.

Consider me hooked.

Actually, the show had me in the first three minutes -- even before the credits rolled. "Snoop" rolls into a Home Depot look-alike, buys a new nail gun, and rolls out with a newly devoted fan.

Check it out.

Madchester

2006-08-21T18:52:00.000-05:00

Not sure how this movie has stayed out of my life until now, but I finally got around to watching 24 Hour Party People.

Brilliance!

A 20-year (or so) odyssey tracking the rise and dissolution of Factory Records under the thoroughly honest, thoroughly neurotic and thoroughly human leadership of Tony Wilson.

Built around the twin story arcs of Joy Division and Happy Mondays, Steve Coogan covers all with his droll delivery. Danny Cunningham is a dead ringer for Shaun Ryder, but the early part of the movie is stolen by Sean Harris as a spot-on Ian Curtis doppelganger.

Great comedy, great music, great nostalgia.

Loved it.

Tigah!

2006-08-21T10:26:00.000-05:00

Well, if there was any doubt about it previously, this weekend put it all to rest.

Despite a final round 74, Phil Mickelson's Top 20 finish in the PGA Championship at Medinah proved that he's surely the best player in the world.

Oh, wait a minute. That's not what this weekend proved. What was it?

Oh yeah, it not only proved that Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world -- it proved that he is quite probably better at golf than anyone else in the world is at anything.

Translate Roger Federer's tennis into golf, and he'd lose to Tiger by a couple of strokes.

Translate LeBron James' basketball into golf, and he'd do a Luke Donald fade by the Sunday turn.

Translate George Bush's presidenting in golf, and he'd miss the cut at the Northeastern Pennsylvania Classic on the Nationwide Tour.

You get the picture.

Anyway, all you need to know about why this guy is so far beyond the Fat Kid and every other golfer in the world was written on his face on the 17th green yesterday. He had barely missed an 8-footer for par, giving him his 3rd(!) bogey in four rounds. The bogey dropped his lead from six strokes to five, with one hole left to play -- and he...was...pissed!

The guy strives for perfection in the most perfectionless sport on the planet, and he's gotten to the point where merely beating the hell out of the best field in the world isn't good enough.

Good luck against that, Phil.

Aja

2006-08-19T11:58:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I ran across this absolutely fascinating video on YouTube:

It was so intriguing that I ended up getting the full DVD from Netflix. If anything, the hour-long program (actually an episode of VH-1's "Classic Albums" show from 1999) is even better than just the clip.

Aja is pretty much the definition of "classic album," with all its connotations good and bad. The show goes into great detail about how the methods and madness of Becker & Fagen as they pieced together their ultimate collection. As their sometime guitarist Dean Parks put it, their quest was not for perfection. Perfection was just a first step on the way to perfection plus listenability. Play it perfectly, then play it naturally enough that people will want to listen to it forever.

The formula still works, and I highly recommend the DVD.

Trip To The Dark Side

2006-08-19T11:12:00.000-05:00

Visited the heart of darkness yesterday, a.k.a., Wrigley Field.

Had some wonderful seats, just behind the visitor's dugout, courtesy of Curt & Nora (thanks, C'n'N).

The Cardinals were in town, as were many thousands of Cardinal fans. From the looks of it, the 40K crowd (listed, anyway, don't think there were that many asses-in-seats) it was split right down the middle.

The game itself went pretty much as expected: Cards 11, Cubs 3. It featured six Cardinal homers, including three in the seventh inning alone.

I really don't pay much attention to baseball anymore, but there still is a very special feeling associated with being at a ballpark -- one that always brings out a feeling of childhood deja vu. The smell of stale cigar smoke is gone, but the smell of stale beer and the green, green color of the field remain.

While the view of the game is great, the best part of having seats behind the dugout is the chance you get to see the players up close, and all the little things that go along give a flavor to the game. There is nothing quite like the utterly comfortable insouciance of a pro athlete in his element. Albert Pujols' endless fussing with his two-tone first-baseman's mitt. Ronnie Belliard doing his best "Turtle" impression with his hip-hop uni (dreads and skullcap under his cap, blousy shirt pulled out and folded over just so).

The game moves on, and the details may change, but the swagger of a big-leaguer never does.

Life On The High Seas: A to Z

2006-08-09T10:35:00.000-05:00

Last week was spent at sea, and unlike the experience of some benighted souls, all went well.

To celebrate their upcoming 50th anniversary, my in-laws took a Caribbean cruise -- and graciously brought their children and their families along as well. An early, early Sunday flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, followed by a quick cab ride, brought us within sight of the Adventure Of The Seas -- 15 decks high, more than three football fields long, and briefly described as "The Biggest Thing I've Ever Seen That Wasn't The Hoover Dam Or Something." 10 pm that night brought cast-off, and here is the cruise from A to Z.

A is for Aruba, the first stop after a day at sea. Prior to becoming known for the disappearance of an Alabama blonde, Aruba was known (at least by me) as a tropical paradise. Turns out, not so much. Although the beaches can be quite beautiful, most of Aruba is as dry as a desert. The north coast of the island, especially, is pretty much a moonscape on the edge of a heaving ocean. Harsh, desolate, and mostly inacessible except by jeep (which is what we used to tour it), it's almost the perfect antithesis of what you would expect from a Caribbean island.

B is for Balcony. Our cabin was at the stern of the ship on the 10th deck, which means our balcony afforded us a perfectly wonderful panoramic view of where we'd just been from about 100 feet above the water. Nice.

C is for Curaçao, our second stop, the day after Aruba. Although it certainly appeared to be quite a bit more lush and green than Aruba, we really didn't see much of Curaçao outside of its port/capital, Willemstad. Truth is, the day on Curaçao was by far the most hot and uncomfortable of the entire week, so we didn't do much other than walk into town and spend a couple of hours ducking into air-conditioned shops, staying on the shady side of the street, and eventually winding up at a riverside bar for an Amstel (not light, not bright, just regular Amstel) and a Polar.

D is for Drinking, which Noreen and I did quite a lot of on this trip. By my recollection, there were 14 different bars on the boat, and we managed to visit just about all of them at one time or another. Added to that, we had a 3-way wine package that brought 21 bottles of wine to dinner over the course of the week. Best drink of the week? Had to be the gin-and-tonics from the poolside bar on the first day at sea.

E is for Eating, the other half of the killer cruise combo. It's not the greatest food in the world, but it is pretty widely varied and it is available pretty much all of the time. Not easy to avoid when you can basically just walk up and start chowing (or call up room service, order, and then start chowing) any time of the day or night. Final result of all the eating and drinking? One pound (see "X").

F is for French Bistro, which we managed to find a very nice one of for lunch in Grand Case on St. Martin. While we didn't partake of the full hot lunch that the locals favor, the croques, french bread jambon et fromage, chocolate crossaint and cold, cold El Presidente. Sure, the beer wasn't French, but everything was awfully good.

G is for the GPS Channel, which turned out to be the most interesting channel on the cabin TV. Location, speed, lat & longitude, course, sea depth, bridge cam -- pretty much everything a geek would ever want to know about where you are when you're out in the middle of nowhere.

H is for Hurricanes, which we thankfully didn't run into. We did have some near misses of Tropical Storm Chris (now Tropical Depression Chris...sorry, Chris) which preceded us into St. Martin and the Virgin Islands (while we were in Aruba and Curaçao), making those islands pretty wet but thankfully not doing much to ruin our vacation.

I is for Irena. Not another Tropical Storm, but our dining room waitress for the week (well, I guess she was technically the assistant waiter, but anyway). One of the interesting aspects of the cruise was the very international nature of the ship's staff. The captain was Norwegian, our cabin attendant was Jamaican, our head waiter and waiter were Turkish, Irena was Bulgarian, etc., etc. Found out quite a bit about life on board from Irena -- 70-hour, 7-day workweeks for 6 months, followed by 2 months off. Her husband also works on board, and as a matter of fact was our waiter one night when we ate at a different restaurant. Both will head back to Bulgaria during their months off, and ultimately would like to open their own restaurant there somewhere on the Black Sea. Not sure what a Bulgarian restaurant would be like, exactly, but Irena will be a hell of a front woman for it regardless.

J is for Jazz Club, which they had one of on the boat. I know it was a little DisneyWorld-y, but each of the bars on the ship had some kind of theme. The jazz club was on the 14th deck with a view overlooking the pool and the ocean was one of the coolest places we found to sit and have a drink.

K is for Karaoke. Not that I've seen or done much karaoke, but easily the worst I've ever seen was in one of the lounges onboard this ship one night. Maybe it was just bad luck, but each of the first several songs were awful ballads (after which we high-tailed it), and when the second song is a complete nine-minute version of "Paradise By The Dashboard Light?" then you've got a problem.

L is for Liverpool, one of three soccer shirts I found for 20 bucks in Willemstad, which were pretty much the only thing I bought all week that wasn't in a glass.

M is for ManU, one of the other two.

N is for Never mind.

O is for Oh get a life, Dick.

P is for Pannenkoeken, the Dutch pancakes we had for lunch on Aruba. I had apple and bacon, and it was awesome. Slices of both are fried right into the large, thin, crepe-like pancake. Great sweet-and-salty combination.

Q is for Quarterdeck. The quarterdeck of the Adventure of the Seas has a basketball court, a climbing wall and a putt-putt course. You could look it up.

R is for Rolling Seas, which we encountered almost none of. In fact, I have to say that the sailing was so smooth that most of the time at sea you could barely tell that the ship was afloat and moving at all.

S is for St. Martin, our third island stop. Not a large island, but big enough to essentially be split down the middle by the Dutch and the French. The ship docked in Philipsburg on the Dutch half, but after renting a car we spent most of the day in the French half (see "F" and "O"). St. Martin was probably the most tropical of the islands we saw, certainly the greenest, and probably our favorite stop (see "O" again).

T is for George Takei, who seems to have taken the same cruise as us a couple of years ago. Oddly, though, given George's lifestyle, he seems to have left the nude beach to the Star Trek fans.

U is for Ultramarine, which was the color of the water on the beaches we went to. Sweet.

V is for the Virgin Islands, specifically St. Thomas, our last stop before returning to San Juan. As was the case with Philipsburg, the port of Charlotte Amalie is on an absolutely beautiful harbor. Our experience on the island was pretty much limited to wandering around downtown for a while shopping (this happened to be the only day that it rained during the whole trip). The best part of the day, however, turned out to be when we left port. The maneuver was basically the same as backing your car out of the garage, only your car is a thousand feet long and 15 stories high. Pretty cool.

W is for Water. It's a fact that the ocean is filled with water. Lots and lots of water. Really, a lot of water. And it's very, very blue. That bit about "the ocean blue" is right on, man. It's blue.

X is for eXercising (I know it's a reach, but what the hell, how much junk on a ship starts with an "X"?). The ship had a great workout center -- lots of treadmills and ellipticals and weight machines -- which was very fortunate. Otherwise, "D" and "E" above would have had us looking like ... well, looking like a lot of the people on the buffet line. Interesting thing, though. Beginning of the week, gym is packed. End of the week, mmm, not so much.

Y is for Yummy, which describes the desserts we had every night at dinner.

and Z is for Zero, which describes the number of times I didn't enjoy myself on this trip. Thanks, Norb & Kay and Happy 50th!

Netflix

2006-08-09T09:14:00.000-05:00

In what is surely a death knell for one of the stars of internet commerce and one of the paradigmatic exemplars of "the long tail," I finally signed up for Netflix.

Oh, look, Mr. Death is reaping on the horizon now.

Well, regardless it did seem like a good time to join the rest of the human race and leave Blockbuster behind -- not that I've gone there more than a couple of times in the past year.

Recently received, watched, and returned my first two movies: "You Can Count On Me," and "Bottle Rocket."

The verdicts?

YCCOM is a showcase for Mark Ruffalo, but even more so for the great Laura Linney. Given a great script to work with, she delivers a typically nuanced performance as a single-mom whose carefully constructed life starts to come apart a little bit at the seams when her no-goodnik brother shows up to sponge some cash and ends up staying for a few weeks. Highly recommended.

Bottle Rocket is equally a showcase for Owen Wilson, with typically more uneven results. Wes Anderson's first feature, it bears traces of the respective shticks of both -- Wilson's rigidly contained bubbling mayhem and Anderson's visual quirks and infused soundtrack -- but without being fully formed just yet. Not bad, but not great.

A-L, A-gain

2006-07-12T13:45:00.000-05:00

Last night the American League made it 9 wins and a tie in the last 10 All-Star games, this time waiting until their last strike to take down the Nationals in the increasingly one-sided midsummer classic.

As I noted last year at this time, this is in stark contrast to the situation back when the school-kid version of me gave a crap about his American League favorites. The less I pay attention, the better the junior circuit does.

Way to go, boys. I feel great knowing I did my part by watching all of one inning (the first) -- which is actually one inning more than I managed last year.

La Copa

2006-07-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

30 days, 64 games, 12 venues and 31 losing teams later -- Italy stands on a wobbly perch atop the world, trophy in hand. Wobbly not so much because of the quality of their play -- particularly their defensive play -- but because in the end their championship was won on the basis of a tiny mis-hit on a penalty kick.

After 30 days and 64 game, the championship was decided by the mere fraction of an inch (let's be worldly and call it a few centimeters) by which Frenchman David Trezeguet's penalty kick hit too far up on the crossbar. It came down a foot in front of the line, and that was all the opening that was needed when all five of the Italian tries finished in the back of the net.

And there you have the first reason why the World Cup sucks, as well as the first reason why it rocks.

WORLD CUP SUCKS! - What the hell kind of sport decides its ultimate championship in a manner thoroughly at odds with the rest of the game? It's the championship of the world, right? Do fans of the sport have something better to do? You couldn't just keep playing until sheer exhaustion results in the fatal mistake that ends it all? The NHL does it every spring in the Stanley Cup playoffs and it happens to be the most interesting happening in sports. It's as if you had a World Series Game 7 go into extra innings, but instead of playing it out to the bitter end, you play a couple of extra innings and then have a homerun derby to decide the championship. Insane? Of course, but fundamentally no different from how yesterday's game went.

WORLD CUP ROCKS! - Despite the suck-aspect of it, there is no denying that the tension involved in a penalty-kicks finish is through the roof. Given the odds against a great penalty-kick save, most misses come down to pressure-induced mis-kicks -- as was the case with Trezeguet yesterday. The fact that every Italian made their kick yesterday, and not every Frenchie made theirs, may not say much about how the two play soccer, but it does say something -- however slight -- about how they react to pressure, and that's not nothin'

WORLD CUP SUCKS! - Please, stop with the flopping and the rolling around and the grabbing your shins and the f-ing stretchers! Seriously, what is with the stretchers all the time? This is easily the most ridiculous aspect of the sport, certainly the least appealing. Maybe it's something genetic with soccer players, but really, you're soccer players, not actors. You're not fooling anyone!

WORLD CUP ROCKS! - FIFA managed to get one thing right -- well, three things right -- and that was their choices for the referees in the semifinals and the final. Most of the ridiculous flopping and acting vanished once these guys made it clear -- and it was early in all three games -- that this crap wasn't gonna work.

WORLD CUP SUCKS! - Would it kill FIFA to hire a second referee for these games? Jeez, hockey has two refs, and a rink is maybe a quarter of the size of a soccer field. Football has, what, 10 or 11 officials -- and that field isn't even as big as a soccer field. It sure seems like most bad calls are the result of refs trailing the play by 20 or 30 yards and missing things as they huff to get back in the game. Perhaps the most important play of the final was when Zinedine Zidane inexplicably took down an Italian with a bald-head ram to the solar plexus. Of course, the referee missed it. It was pointed out to him by a helpful linesman, but even he made the call only after seeing the replay on the in-stadium big screen (although FIFA denies this).

WORLD CUP ROCKS! - Watching the World Cup gives a novice the best insight into why the rest of the world enjoys soccer. At its highest level, the sport has an unparalleled combination of speed, endurance, skill and creativity. Only basketball is in the same arena combining all of these aspects, but even basketball isn't played on as large a field -- or as large a stage.

WORLD CUP SUCKS! - Perversely, though, the World Cup pretty much spoils me for the rest of the sport. The skill levels are so high, and the stakes are so high as well, that nothing else in the sport is even remotely close. Face it, after watching the WC is anyone interested in watching the MLS? Didn't think so.

WORLD CUP ROCKS! - I watched more soccer in the last month than I had in the rest of my life put together. Why would I bother if it sucked?

More Movies

2006-06-17T11:08:00.000-05:00

Took the daughters to see X-Men 3 at the local googleplex.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a big comic guy ... what's that? ... oh, uh, sorry, "graphic novel" guy. My interest in comics wore out with Richie Rich in the fourth grade. But I did see X-Men 2 -- sort of, anyway, I saw it in about 10 different pieces at different times on cable over the past couple of years -- and found it rather entrancing. Particularly Famke Janssen's hair. And bod.

Anyway, the point is that I was pretty primed to like this movie.

I didn't.

With the exception of brief shot of a nude, raven-haired Rebecca Romjin-(sic)-no-hyphen-no-Stamos, there wasn't a whole lot to like about it. Maybe the most interesting part of the movie was trying to remember who the Birdman of Alcatraz was (no kidding, he's a mutant bird-boy who swoops onto Alcatraz to save his father who's about to be hurled to a plummeting death). Turns out it was Russell from Six Feet Under. Of course.

Combine a wispy-thin plot with mind-numbing special effects, throw in a bedraggled-looking Famke (WTF? Why would you want to bedraggle Famke?) and the same fight scenes over and over and over and you wind up with a mess.

And that's X-Men 3.

On the little screen, we rented The Squid And The Whale. Still not sure about this one. My sense is that it's worth a couple of viewings (or more), but is so unrelentingly depressing that I could only make it through one by force of will.

Jeff Daniels plays essentially the same character he played in Terms Of Endearment, an English professor cum failed writer with a roving eye and an utterly annoying personality. Laura Linney is his newly ascendent writer wife who soon becomes his ex-wife. Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline play their increasingly troubled pair of sons, Walt and Frank.

Teenager Walt seems on a path to replicate all of his fathers worst traits -- deceitful, haughty and utterly lacking in humor. He improbably passes off a Pink Floyd song as his own at a school talent show, and when eventually confronted with his deceit he claims that he could have written the song, and thus it's as if he did write the song. Rationalizations which you could see Daniels' character make just as easily.

Younger Frank, on the other hand, seems on a path straight to hell. Swiggin' beers (later whiskey), cutting himself, cussing like a sailor on shore leave, etc., the kid is a complete mess and his parents (especially his father) just can't quite seem to see that.

Essentially a coming-of-age tale in the age of divorce -- it's said to be basically autobiographical of director Noah Baumbach and is set in the mid-80's -- it's numbingly depressing to know that there may be people like Daniels' character out in the world.

VinceVaughnathon

2006-06-11T17:28:00.000-05:00

Had a little VinceVaughnathon with the wifey this weekend. That is if you can call two movies an -athon. I'm calling it.

Friday we went to see The Break Up at the local megalopoplex. It's a c0uple of weeks into the run, but still a pretty full theatre, so good for you ... Jence? Vinnifer? We'll call it Vinnifer.

The movie starts out with a full head of steam. Soon after a quick recount of their cute meet at Wrigley Field we watch Vinnifer explode in a fit of ill will and recriminations. Gary (that's Vince) is a bit of a slob who doesn't help Brooke (that's Jen) with ... anything. Brooke is a bit of a control freak who won't let Gary get a pool table. Seriously.

The breakup scene itself is a really quite realistic portrayal of how things can get out of hand so rapidly that you quickly find yourself saying things you soon wish you hadn't, but which you can't stuff back into your mouth and unsay.

So anyway, that's it for them as a couple. The problem is the choice bit of real estate that is their jointly-owned Chicago condo. Neither will just hand it over, and neither can buy out the other -- so eventually they're forced to sell. In the meantime, of course, they're still living together -- albeit in separate rooms -- and busily trying to get the other to be the first to admit to the breakup regret that they both feel.

In the end, neither is able to saddle up and tell the other that they're sorry and want them back, so they go around and around and around, then eventually sell the condo and the breakup is complete.

Well, maybe. A tacked-on little coda leaves the door open for a future reconciliation -- even though things won't work out any better then. Fact is that these two are an unlikely pair, and both would have been better off just breaking up and moving on. But that ending wouldn't be quite enough like every other movie you've ever seen that is exactly like this.

Part II of the Vaughnathon was a rental last night of Wedding Crashers. I know, I know, I'm probably the last person in the world to see this movie, but what the hell -- now everyone has seen it, OK?

Can one of you other six billion tell me what all the fuss was about?

Wedding Crashers in two words? Not funny.

I'd heard that the first 45 minutes or so were kick-ass funny, and the rest kind of petered out. Not so much.

True enough that the last 1:15 wasn't that great (that's right, at least on the video this was a 2 hour movie). Trouble was that the first 45 minutes also had pretty much zero laughs.

Listen, I'm as big a fan of Owen Wilson as anyone else, but even he can't carry a movie like this if he's got nothing funny to say. Maybe he's just better off writing his own stuff. And if Owen can't pull it off, Vin's got no hope.

Once the pair is spirited off to Christopher Walken's estate (this is Christopher Walken doing a Christopher Walken imitation, b/t/w) the movie drags to a complete stop. Will Ferrell (of course) makes a quick cameo and provides a little pulse and some laughs as the uber-playa that taught Vince the trade of crashing-weddings-to-get-laid (he's since moved up to crashing funerals), but it's all in the service of no plot and no laughs so it's too little, too late.

Ministry Of Cringe

2006-06-06T05:59:00.000-05:00

So there have been at least a couple of occasions that I've been watching BBC America, and one or another member of my family has wandered by and asked, "Which one is Michael?"

Only I wasn't watching "The Office."

I was watching what is probably my new favorite show, "The Thick Of It."

British comedies -- not that I know that many -- seem to fall into two categories, acerbic or adolescent. Part of what made Monty Python so great was its ability to straddle and merge the two.

"The Thick Of It" is absolutely the most acerbic television show I've ever seen. It is the story of Hugh Abbott, the new Minister of Social Affairs (Social Affairs?), and his staff. The show revolves around their daily efforts to stay out of the papers, off the telly and especially out of the line of fire of Malcolm, the PM's chief politico and head torturer.

Now I'll admit that I've often had to watch episodes twice just to figure out what the hell is going on. As with any good Brit comedy, half the fun is figuring out what the hell they're talking about -- if you can understand the words themselves, that is. Malcolm is front and center w/r/t this. As part of the PM's "Scots Mafia" his specialty is the burr-inflected, profanity-laced tirade against whatever comes into his field of vision.

When the hurricane hits it is positively terrifying.

And hilarious.

So That's It, Is It?

2006-06-05T06:59:00.000-05:00

So we now know why HBO and David Chase added 8 more episodes to the life of The Sopranos (due to air next January?).

If last night's episode was ever considered to be the last of the series, we can easily see why that idea was quickly nixed.

There would have been a riot.

When you think about it, Sopranos fans kind of have to put up with a lot in order to enjoy the show. To start with, of course, you have to pay for it. Worth every penny of course, but worth mentioning.

More importantly, we've had to put up with the spotty scheduling and the extended hiatuses (hiati?) between short (13 episode, or even 12 episode) seasons. In all, it's taken about 7 years to air 77 episodes.

Both problems are worth it, as the result has generally been a high-quality page-turner of a show.

This season, though, has been a bit more problematic. The story of Vito, the wide-guy/wise-guy turned Johnnycake-lovin' antiquer, was a source of endless mirth -- at least until his brutal death.

Likewise, the continuing tale of "just how big of a jag is A.J.?" provided some classic moments. The look on Tony's face when A.J. described the angst of clubbing with a two-bottle-of-Cristal-minimum hanging over your head was utterly beautiful.

But the focus of the season was on the "what is this crazy life all about" stories of Tony, Carmela and Chris-ta-fa.

Tony getting plugged by a crazed Uncle Junior was probably the most startling moment of the series, but little else in the "search for meaning" storylines was all that interesting. Tony-as-Kevin-Finnerty drove out to the beacon and was nearly coaxed by Steve Buscemi into joining the family reunion that never ends.

Meadow managed to lure him back into the land of the living, complete with a new outlook on life.

Well, sort of.

By the end of the season, he's gloating over Phil Leotardo's heart attack.

Carmela gets yanked around like a mindless puppet. Her relentless pursuit of Adriana's fate quickly short-circuited by the dangling bauble of a shoddily-built spec house.

And Chris-ta-fa makes a spur-of-the-moment jump into marriage, immediately followed by a spur-of-the-moment descent back into smack -- this time with Nurse Carol Hathaway. But it's OK, cuz they don't do each other when they're doing H -- and they don't use needles!

All of which means not a whole lot was resolved in last night's sixth-season-finale.

But my money's on a rally next winter, and we'll get our closure.

Darth Vader Calls The Emperor

2006-05-27T10:58:00.000-05:00

Canuck Amuck

2006-05-25T06:43:00.000-05:00

Redonkulous opening game of the Western Finals last night.

Devin Harris' 3-point-play at 3:43 gave the Mavs a seemingly insurmountable 9-point lead.

That's when the NBA's first Canadian hippie MVP/anti-war activist took over. 3 minutes, 10 points, and a perfectly executed pick-and-roll assist later, the Suns were up a point.

After a Mavs turnover and a missed Suns shot, the surprising Harris (30 points) threw the dagger with a 16-footer from the right wing with 4-seconds left.

Only it wasn't the last dagger.

The Suns' Boris Diaw posted up Jerry Stackhouse on the inbounds play and nailed the real game-winner.

121-118 Suns, and a promise of more thrills to come in this old-school (i.e., offense a-plenty) series.

Great Idea. Never Happen.

2006-05-24T06:26:00.000-05:00

Slate's Josh Levin correctly identifies the Number 1 problem with this spring's otherwise scintillating NBA playoffs.

Too many timeouts.

This year's playoffs have featured a startling number of tight contests, overtime games and nail-biting seventh-games. Without fail, though, the games are in great measure ruined by their laborious stop-and-start finishes.

The last few minutes of a playoff game should burble with tension. Instead, we get an interminable, deflating cycle of sideline reports, inbound passes, and detergent commercials. There is a simple, elegant solution to this endgame insanity: Ban the timeout. ...

Let's say the NBA eradicated timeouts from the bench and replaced them with TV timeouts at the nine-, six-, and three-minute marks of each quarter. The networks could sell the same amount of ads, the coaches could talk strategy and make plenty of substitutions, and the players could rest. Most important, the endgame could be presented without commercial interruption. Maybe then the final act of a playoff game would be as exciting as the first quarter.

Great idea. Never Happen.

The fact is, the placing of timeouts in the interests of the game is exactly opposed to the placing of timeouts in the interests of television. Levin's idea would in fact improve the games immeasurably. As it is, all flow is lost, and the final minute is simply a series of set-pieces. Eventually the pressure of the moment comes to bear, but only after long minutes of lethargy.

The problem is that the placement of timeouts (and commercials) where they are is certainly in the interests of television. The preponderance of commercial spots are right where the greatest numbers of viewers are to be found -- at the end of the game.

And this is why exactly nothing will change about this.

TV coverage has little impact on most sports. Baseball, football, golf, tennis, none of these really have to change their action as a kow-tow to television. Soccer -- to the extent anyone is watching -- has forced TV to come up with new solutions in order to televise games without stopping for commercials.

Television kills basketball. All the pressure of a close game is dissipated by the endless waiting around, and taking 15 minutes to play the final minute -- only to have the game go into overtime and have the cycle start over again is just mind-numbing.

And it's not going to change anytime soon.