Author: Stagger Lee

I had my second run on the smoker today.  Couple of pork shoulders went in at 8 AM, a couple racks of ribs in front of them at noon, and by 6 PM it was dinnertime.  No sauce, just a rub of the wife’s devising, and nothing fancy on the wood – just white and a little red oak. And like last time, it went down a treat with the people to whom I fed it.

There’s a pattern forming: rub down the pork shoulder the night before and put it in a bag in the fridge overnight.  Come up with a gallon of Arnold Palmer somewhere – either bought in a jug from Safeway or just get a bottle of tea and a bottle of lemonade from Whole Foods and mix.  Plus coffee to start off with.  And the fire gets lit at 7:45 and is usually good to go just in time to insert the aluminum pans with the shoulders in them at 8.  Then tend the fire for a while with Absolute Radio’s Rock and Roll Football coverage, including the whole of Ian Wright’s call-in show, which takes me through to about 11.  After that, just play music on the iPhone, catch up any remaining podcasts, doodle around on the computer, read the Kindle.  Open and rub down the ribs at 11:45, on the rack in the smokebox at noon, and then it’s just sitting around waiting and tending the fire.  Don’t let it drop below 150 or get much over 180, and I still don’t have a really good sense of the wood.  The afternoon wasn’t as predictable as the first time, and the fire seemed to run hotter.

It’s also cold. I don’t know how much of that is just cool weather and overcast skies, how much is sitting still in a reclining chair at 8 AM, and how much is made worse by the Arnold Palmer blend, but my designated smoking outfit tends to be a t-shirt, then the soft-shell, then a canvas jacket over that, creating the look of a heavy work coat.  Which makes sense to me; a blanket-lined Carhartt is about what I’d expect to wear running a smoker in winter.  Makes for a lot to wash when I get home, though – the wife claims that the smoke effect is if anything stronger (though less unpleasant) than the days when I’d come home having smoked two cigars.  I’m a little curious how it’s going to be this summer.

I’m also a little curious how the iPad is going to work out.  I have Wi-Fi in the yard where the smoker is, so that’s not a problem, and the iPad should last a hell of a lot longer than the MacBook Air has done.  Will I end up with iPad and iPhone running simultaneously?  Probably.  Might still staff out books to the Kindle just for battery purposes.  But no matter what the reading material (or surfing options), it always adds up to a quiet, relaxed afternoon with plenty of five-space.  Time to myself in a good cause – or at least a good cause as far as the folks at dinner are concerned.

There’s very little to it.  All the work is in assembling the rub and applying it to the meat.  Once the fire is lit and the meat’s in its box, the rest of it is just hanging out waiting with an eye on the thermometer and occasionally pitching a log into the firebox.  No basting, no swabbing, no rotating anything – the smoke does the work and I just sit there with my feet up.  Odd, that I should find a new hobby less than a week before turning 40 and take to it so readily, but I admit I have – it’s almost dead solid perfect, even if it means getting out of bed at 7:30 Saturday morning.  It gives me alone time and plenty of it, followed almost immediately and of necessity by social time.  I don’t even need that much of the meat myself – but there’s plenty to go around, and I cooked.  I never cook.  At best I might throw a steak on the grill for ten minutes. But this is dinner I made, and people like it, which is gratifying and positive reinforcement for the future. And there’s one imperial shit-ton of wood already there, enough for at least a half-dozen more runs.

Once a month, minimum.  Not a bad habit to get into.

The wife directs me this morning to this blog post, which makes a case that people who are not that smart are incapable of recognizing that they are not that smart.  With nontrivial consequences for things like, oh, democracy.  Or climate change and the denial of same.

If you have been reading this blog longer than about thirty seconds, you will realize that I find this shocking NOT AT ALL.  Couple that knowledge with the fact that one political party in this country has been hard at work milking the venom of anti-intellectualism for decades now, and you can see not only how we got in this mess but why our prospects for escaping it are limited at best.

To complete the parody quote from the title… “I see dumb people. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other.  They only see what they want to see.  They don’t know they’re dumb. All the time.  They’re everywhere.”

And they will be the death of us, if we let them.

I wiped the iPhone last night.  The home button has become incorrigible, even after getting air-blasted by the good folks at the University Ave Genius Bar in PA, but yesterday the Music app went completely clowner-cockwise.  You’d pick a song and nothing would happen.  Fast forward, reverse, nothing.  So you’d pick another song, and it would immediately skip ahead to the next song – and if you tried to reverse, you’d get everything that LOOKED like the first song but the second song playing.  And if you tried to fast-forward, it would skip right ahead to the third song,  And it would never play more than about four tracks before stopping dead again.

So I took the final measure you can take with an iPhone: wipe it clean and set it up as new rather than restoring from backup.  I took the opportunity to pare down the load on the iPhone substantially – it’s probably carrying half the apps and half the video it had earlier and there’s a good 6+ GB of free space on it now.  It made for a healthy exercise in getting rid of all the stuff I feel compelled to schlep around but never actually use for anything, and we’ll see what the results are like.  But so far, everything seems to be healed.  Maybe the move is just to blow the phone away once a year and try to mop up afterwards.

Meanwhile, I have the work iPad doing just the reverse – I am setting it up with everything I want/need/think I need and backing up to iCloud with the idea that I will collect my new iPad from UPS a week from today and promptly restore it from said backup. This will also allow me to work on determining what apps need to move to the iPad more or less permanently (hint: Netflix, Crackle, Hulu+, GoodPlayer, etc etc).

It’s amazing in retrospect that we ever tried to do this nonsense on a 220×176 phone display.  I remember looking longingly at the W600 from Sony Ericsson, that switchblade-format device with the handle-style antenna, and putting the J2ME version of Google Maps on it at the AT&T store to see how practical it was.  I had Opera Mini on my old Moto V630.  I tried to make do with the P800 and the Nokia 6620, in the search for something that would do Bluetooth AND speakerphone AND high-speed EDGE data AND get my email AND run rudimentary applications AND take pictures (and maybe even video).  And then I took possession of my first iPhone in 2007, free of charge, and the days of phone glee were more or less brought to a screeching halt.

I just wanted to live in the future.  Now I do. =)

January 27, 2010:

…I haven’t been so disappointed in an Apple product – well, ever. The day the iPhone was announced, I was crestfallen at the release date, then resolved to have the money saved up by day one. The day the MacBook was released, I was in my boss’s office begging for the high-end black model. Today, I don’t really understand what this thing is good for….

…here’s the fatal flaw: if you have an iPhone, you have 90% of this already. Do you really want to pay out double the money again, plus an extra $30 bill every month, just to do it on a larger screen?…

…it’s an interesting idea, but right now, at the current price points, the marginal utility for me is nonexistent. I just wonder how many other people will find a reason to give it a whirl anyway…

Well. Erm. This is awkward.

Let’s see what I said after I slept on it.

January 28, 2010:

* The common thread among those who have seen and touched and used the iPad is that “you won’t truly understand until you handle it; words and specs and YouTube video doesn’t do justice to the experience of using it.” My regard for Stephen Fry is such that I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this front.

Lesson learned: trust Stephen Fry. In fairness, going from 1024×768 to 2048×1536 on the same display will probably make things even more visually impressive.

 

* Everyone seems to think that $499 is not a bad price to pay at the entry level for this thing. That’s as may be – no one has ever accused me of having a good sense of the value of money one way or the other, and I will agonize for literally months over a $20 Nerf gun but think nothing of donking off $20 worth of coffee and soda in a day – but my comparisons are to things like a $299 netbook, or $199 iPod Touch, or $200-something Kindle 2 that comes with free lifetime wireless access. Against that, $500 is kind of steep no matter how you slice it.

This has actually stood up.  Nobody, but nobody, has brought in an iPad competitor at an appreciably lower figure – there’s always some sort of compromise on size, or weight, or performance or battery life. The only folks who have undercut this in any meaningful way are the Kindle Fire team, who did it by going to a 7″ tablet with a forked version of 2010’s Android rev and explicitly abjuring anything but media consumption (of which more later).  I’m a little surprised (but pleasantly so) to say that the price point hasn’t budged across the board three generations later.  Meanwhile, the netbook has been exposed…

 

* I played around with a Dell Mini 10 running Windows XP this afternoon. I think the search indexing was running some of the time, which didn’t help, but the general feel was: OH. DEAR. GOD. SO. SLOW. I wonder if it would be any better with Xubuntu on it instead. The keyboard on the Mini 10 is the best I’ve seen yet on a netbook, and even pwns the keyboard on some of Dell’s full-sized small-business offerings (Vostro 1520, I’m looking at you…and contemplating using the bathroom) but if that’s as fast as it gets…maybe the fundamental problem is that things like the iDevices or the Kindle have a purpose-built Device OS rather than a full-size Computing OS (such as Windows, etc), and as such can run their own apps and things faster on less powerful hardware than trying to coax Windows performance out of an Atom N270. (God help you if you try to watch QuickTime movies on that thing…)

This is how Apple made the tablet work in a way no one ever had: instead of trying to scale Windows down, scale a phone OS up.  I don’t need to re-link all my posts about my six-month experiment with the netbook; suffice to say that it was a compromised and compromising experience and I was never able to use it.  Even the original iPad clubbed it for screen resolution and use of said screen alike.  The hottest device of 2009 has ceased to be a thing in any meaningful way, because everyone’s rolled over to tablets, because you can’t seem to make using Windows on an Atom processor and a 1024×600 screen a remotely tolerable experience.

 

* The thing I always come back to is…blogging. You wouldn’t ever want to blog on an iPhone. Twitter, Tumblr, sure – but nothing over 100 words. Looking at the Kindle, I’m not sure you’d want to blog on it even if you could – the keyboard is made for a long session with a surgeon about the damage you’ve done to the ligaments and tendons in your thumbs. And looking at the iPad, I still don’t see how typing on a flat glass screen is going to work.

Well. Erm. I did it.  Repeatedly.  And banged out longer posts on the Bluetooth keyboard as required.  And that was all without the useful aid of the tilted SmartCover for setting it on a flat surface and typing at an angle instead of looking flat down.

 

* Devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch/Kindle/smartphones generally – they are meant for consumption, not creation. You read on them, you surf on them, you do a little communicating on them, but you don’t use them to hammer out the Great American Novel*** or design your website or handle your taxes. For all their weakness and lack of power, netbooks actually give you some small opportunity to produce; if the iPad turns out to be unsuitable for same (iWork or no iWork), it really will be consigned to the Kindle/overgrown iPod Touch category.

Well, um…iWork (all three programs).  Garage Band. iMovie and now iPhoto.  Put another way: I could take the new iPad to Punxsutawney and shoot the threequel to 02:02:02 next February on the iPad, cut up the video in its entirety on the iPad, and publish it to the Internet through Vimeo on the iPad. Sure, it’s probably no good for Framemaker or Oracle developers, but the idea that the iPad is only suitable for consumption is deader than Rick Perry’s campaign.

Flash forward to when I finally got to handle the thing:

April 5, 2010:

I’m not having quite the OMG IT IS THE FUTURE experience that I see in the reviews, but it is a nice piece of work. It’s not $500 nice, for sure, but this is going to kill a lot of what would have been Kindle and Nook sales. It will also light a fire under somebody to get an Android-based tablet experience out the door sooner than later. From a philosophical point of view, though, the thing I can’t stop thinking over and over is “it’s the Dynabook”. Alan Kay’s landmark vision of a super-thin 9×12 tablet weighing not more than two pounds was a theory that drove the development of portable computing for the better part of a half century. And now, this is pretty much it. If Apple gets an edu discount going on these things by August, they are going to sell a trillion of them…

April 6, 2010:

…It’s got sex appeal, make no mistake. You could go out to a public park with a baby, a beagle puppy and a big-eyed stuffed turtle and you wouldn’t draw the crowd an iPad does. It certainly hits all Apple’s usual markers for industrial design….I think the biggest impact of the iPad is yet to come – I don’t think the apps that are going to make it indispensable exist yet. I think much will depend on what happens with the developers who just now have one in their hands. I also think much will depend on what gets discussed on Thursday, when the iPhone 4 talk takes place in Cupertino. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more consolidation in what is emerging as OS X Mobile, for lack of a better word – in stark contrast to the fragmentation currently happening with Android….

April 8, 2010:

…It’s quite a gadget. It certainly seems to obviate the need for a dedicated e-book reader. It’s incredibly easy to pull out and use in a way you’d never use a notebook, just because of the whole folding action and the space it takes up. (I really wish I’d had this trick on the trip to DC.) And by using a phone OS, it’s incredibly fast to get going – button, swipe, 4 digits, Safari, and boom goes the dynamite. As opposed to: open, wait for login box, log in, wait for desktop, double-click icon, wait for app to load…it’s like an iPhone, just pull it out and go, except that the processor is so much faster and the screen so much bigger that you actually get to work and see things sooner and easier. The 4-way screen rotation is great – work from whatever angle you pulled the thing out….Long story short – does this sound familiar? Steve Jobs delivers new product. Not a completely original concept, but the first real consumer-friendly approach, easy to use and sexy as all hell. Looks like a premium product, and priced like one; right off the bat it’s too much money for not as much functionality as you might like, but from day one it becomes the new standard that everyone else is chasing…

 

Which is why, after three and a half hours of struggling with iPhone and laptop to try to hit the most slammed site on the planet (while simultaneously struggling with the worst sort of corporate brainstorming-team nonsense), I closed the deal on a black 32 GB Verizon 4G new iPad, engraved “My Dynabook.”

It’s replaced the laptop.  I don’t have personal material on my work MacBook Air anymore, aside from the contents of MarsEdit and Evernote for convenience’s sake.  No iTunes content, no other personal files aside from things I occasionally scrape into a folder and upload to Box.  Hell, even Safari doesn’t have my bookmarks in it, and there’s damn sure none of my non-work email there.  This device is, for the most part, secure.

But how much easier to get all my personal stuff moved to a 1.4-pound slab the size of a magazine, which I can pull out of a bag and instant-on most anywhere?  Which will let me buy a wedge of 4G data in the US faster than my DSL was until Christmas 2010, or buy a SIM off Orange or O2 next time I’m in the UK and go just as wireless when the Wi-Fi runs out?  Which will last all day without having to remotely think about charge?

In the end, it came down to what is my next laptop, and between an 11″ MacBook Air and an iPad – when I already have the work laptop to handle work stuff, the move has to be the iPad.  Pocket the hundreds of dollars saved, and enjoy the ride into the future of computing.

 

 

 

Before we drop tomorrow morning, a quick summary of where we think we are:

 

1) “iPad HD”, not iPad 3 or anything like.

2) Retina Display, 2048x(768+768 I don’t have time to figure it).

3) LTE 4G.

 

And that’s about it.  Nobody appears to be expecting much else.  Probably a processor bump of some sort, maybe more RAM or an improved camera.  Really crazy stuff such as an 8-inch model seems to be right out.  Tertiary rumors include an improved (1080p capable?) AppleTV, which would make sense.

As it is, if that’s all there is, that’s still enough for me to take the plunge at last.  Probably with “My Dynabook” engraved on the back, because I truly believe Steve thought this was his crowning achievement – Alan Kay’s vision brought to life at last.

To any observer of the NFL, it should be obvious what’s on the way: Fines. Suspensions.  Probably lost draft picks, possibly other things cooked up by the league.  In a truly ironic twist, the New Orleans Saints are about to die for the sins of the NFL – or if not die, suffer mightily, at least.

Because this isn’t new.  Apparently Gregg Williams and his bounty system have been all around the league, from the Titans to the Bills to the Redskins before arriving in New Orleans.  The only difference now is apparently somebody snitched.  But it would be a fool who assumed that this was limited to teams where Crazy Blitz Man was defensive coordinator or head coach – the Eagles famously ran afoul of the “bounty” rules in the late 80s and early 90s under Buddy Ryan, and the idea that a player would be incentivized to disable an opponent…well, let’s be honest: that’s called defense, and it gets incentivized every time ESPN shows another highlight clip on the “Jacked Up” segment or a particularly hard sack is on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

They’re not playing two-hand touch out there. That used to be the defense; now it’s the indictment. The NFL has always gloried in its image as modern gladiatorial bloodsport, the finest of real men battling for victory, while murmuring that we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or his MRI results, or his early death or mental illness or inability to walk.  Everyone knows what this game has become; the Saints defense was just paying accordingly.  But now, because the most important thing about the NFL is that everyone knows what a big swinging dick Roger Goddell is, the Saints are going to take it in the ass.  Because if they don’t, people might start to ask what kind of league this is, and why the interest in player health and safety is limited to making sure no under-the-table money contributes to the future lack of either.

Vanderbilt’s own Chris Marve, linebacker par excellence, is no dummy – he announced today that he’s passing on the NFL and heading for law school.  Of all his moves, this one is probably the best.  Meanwhile, it’s time to start asking how long this can go on in a world where parents are becoming ever more reluctant to let their kids play the sport, and whether the NFL’s move toward glorified Nintendo football eventually winds up with a sport that exists as one big 7-on-7 passing drill.

ETA: crap, Deadspin got there first.

 

The telling thing isn’t that AOL is suspending its advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show.  The telling thing is that AOL was an advertiser.

El Rushbo has managed a pretty sweet gig these last twenty years or so – he gets to be the id of the Republican party, without ever having to face a ballot box.  He is the exemplar of what the GOP stands for in the modern era: talk-radio bluster, safely insulated from little things like consequences.  Until he, like his Presidential candidates, inexplicably decided that 2012 was the year to nail the colors to the mast on the issue of birth control.

(Quick step back: Griswold v Connecticut is the dispositive Supreme Court decision here – in 1965, the Supreme Court threw out the Nutmeg State’s anti-contraception law by a 7-2 vote, finding that the right to privacy trumped any state interest in regulating contraception.  The reason the GOP is fighting to re-litigate Griswold is because the vast majority of modern law around privacy derives from findings in Griswold, and if you somehow kick the tentpole out from under Griswold you suddenly disrupt Roe in every way that matters.  Griswold is perhaps the only finding not concerned with black civil rights that occupies pride of place in the right wing’s hierarchy of “judicial activism”.)

In any event, Rush said some terribly uncouth things, because, well, that’s what he does.  And the hue and cry was palpable, more than it’s been in a long long time, and advertisers started jumping ship.  And so, at the very end of the Friday show, a mealy-mouthed sorta-apology was shat out, and…advertisers kept jumping ship. Right up to this morning when AOL announced it was suspending advertising on the show.

Nobody uses AOL.  This is a patently false statement, reeking of techno-elitism and Silicon Valley insider thought, but I’m going to repeat myself: nobody uses AOL. The only folks using AOL are people who haven’t needed to make any meaningful change in their online presence in, say, 10 years or so.  And in 2012, that overwhelmingly means…the Old Ones.

Jon Chait nailed this a couple weeks back: this really is last call. The GOP base is getting whiter, older – and shrinking.  This may be their last chance to capture the triple-play: Supreme Court, Congress and the White House, and even if it means holding their nose and voting for Romney, they will turn out in force. Because even Romney will serve as an agreeable rubber-stamp for the motive force of the Congressional GOP, which is what George W. Bush was intended to be until Osama bin Laden stopped the 21st Century dead in its tracks.  But if the Democrats hold on and Obama holds on, the odds are slim that the GOP will ever get a chance to pull the wheel hard to the right again.  The last chance to forestall gay marriage, to derail the health-care plan, to build the fence around the United States, to let Israel have sway over Middle East policy and cut taxes and preserve the vision of Nixonland – if the GOP doesn’t get its shot in now, the numbers are against them going forward, and the 50-year project of Kevin Phillips and the Emerging Republican Majority is cooked.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

So the Old Ones are calling the tune, and the GOP is dancing ever faster – and then, the country looks up, and all of a sudden we’re arguing about birth control pills.  And the Old Ones are against it, because they’re against sex in general and certainly against anything that grants agency to women beyond a future as a housewife, and the parts of the country not looking to live in 1952 say “wait, WHAT?”  And then George Will nails it to the wall on Sunday: “these guys want to bomb Iran but they won’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh?”

But that’s what happens when the intellectual engine of your movement is a drug-addled lard-ass bigot with a megaphone: eventually you lose the ability to cope with anything more difficult than a sport-talk zinger.  And then the rest of the world decides to move on.  AOL knows where its customers are…and they’re punting.  Because not even a fellow relic of the 1990s wants to get Rush all over it.

And speaking of the 1990s…but more on that later.

 

(Special thanks to Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning, Mark Stoermer and Ronnie Vannucci Jr, who probably didn’t realize they were saving me the trouble of writing my own autobiography.)

 

It started with a low light
Next thing I knew they ripped me from my bed
And then they took my blood type
They left a strange impression in my head

You know that I was hoping
That I could leave this star-crossed world behind
But when they cut me open
I guess I changed my mind

And you know I might have just flown
Too far from the floor this time
‘Cause they’re calling me by my name

And they’re zipping white light beams
Disregarding bombs and satellites
And that was the turning point
That was one lonely night

Well, now I’m back at home and
I’m looking forward to this life I live
You know it’s gonna haunt me
So hesitation to this life I give

You think you might cross over
You’re caught between the devil and the deep blue sea
You better look it over
Before you make that leap

And you know I’m fine
But I hear those voices at night
Sometimes they justify my claim

And the public don’t dwell on my transmission
‘Cause it wasn’t televised
But it was the turning point
Oh, what a lonely night

My global position systems are vocally addressed
They say the Nile used to run from east to west
They say the Nile used to run from east to west

I’m fine
But I hear those voices at night sometimes

The star maker says it ain’t so bad
The dream maker’s gonna make you mad
The spaceman says, “Everybody look down
It’s all in your mind”

 

And after all that, here we are.  3,653 days after turning 30 in a cloud of angst and regret, Yer Man will turn 40 tomorrow.

What kind of a decade has it been?  Eventful, to be sure.  Setting aside world affairs – war in the Middle East, economic calamity, BLACK PRESIDENT, the explosion of mobility computing and Apple’s rise to the largest company in the world – it’s been a little crazy for me.  I caught the fever for California, clocked an MVP year in DC, then swapped one household name for another and moved 3000 miles.  I got married.  I got an office.  I got my knee scoped, twenty years too late, and changed jobs two more times as part of what I can only describe as the worst fit of clinical depression I’d had in two decades not tied to the death of a parent.  I got a raise.  I got drugs. I got a Rabbit.  I got an iPhone or…um, six.

Looking back, I’d say that I’ve accomplished exactly one thing on my own in ten years: I luck-boxed into a contract position at Apple which turned into a staff hire.  Other than that, my luck has mostly been other people: the guys I fought shoulder-to-shoulder with from 1997 to 2004, who made it possible for me to make my way in Silicon Valley and survive for seven years and counting.  The boss in California who wheedled an interview with not one but two different post-Apple employers to make sure I wouldn’t starve. The surrogate big sister I never thought I wanted until she moved in with us for a year. The cousins who gave me real honest-to-God blood family again. The merry band of high school mutants that rose from the dead twenty years later to give me back an anchor in the past. The cloud of Cal and Vandy supporters who took my nonsense drivel seriously and made it possible to resume my career as a sportswriter seventeen years later. The coven of geniuses in Cupertino whose vision and drive made possible the gadgets on which I can still make my living fifteen years after Michael Dell argued for shutting down Apple and giving the money back to the shareholders (which might be the best move for Dell in 2012).

And behind it all, every step of the way, from the icy sidewalks of Northern Virginia to the cold foggy deck of the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, from the humidity of a Southern highway to the chapel and officer’s club on Treasure Island, from the Caltrain platform to the Jubilee Line on the London Underground – her.  The one who keeps the dream alive, even on the days when I’m not exactly sure what the dream is.

Maybe the things I want for my birthday aren’t things I can have.  But the things I’ve got, I wouldn’t trade for nothin’.

Two years ago, I flew back from a trip to Washington DC to see my old gang.  We met, we hollered, we closed the pub again – but I also got to see their families, play with their kids, and see life beyond the daily battles of seven years ago.  And as the plane was taxiing back into SFO, I heard this song on the in-flight entertainment, and I had one of those moments of epiphany, and I decided – it’s okay to grow up.

And so – forward, as gracefully as I’m capable of, which is honestly not that graceful.  Stick around – if nothing else, the spectacle ought to be entertaining.

(13) FLORIDA   67

VANDERBILT   77

FINAL

 

We finally get a home upset over a ranked opponent.  On Senior Night.  The guys playing their last home game all stepped up in a big way – Jeffrey Taylor and Brad Tinsley in particular just willed this team back in front of Florida and would not let up.  You could tell the 44 Special wasn’t going home without the win – and the ESPN camera caught him in the last minute of the game blinking back tears and swallowing the odd sob.

These guys were the most heralded recruiting class in Vanderbilt history. And yet, not one of them has ever won a game in the NCAA tournament. You can see it in their eyes – midnight is coming, and they are going to do everything in their power to stop their clock striking twelve.

Since 2008, March has meant disaster for the Commodores – the Stallings era has meant a loss in every season finale bar one, and the team has yet to make it to the SEC title game.  And then there’s the one-and-done streak.  But for the first time all year, I’m starting to believe that if by life or death the Dores can stave off elimination, they will.

It’s going to be a big month.