Are my eyes really blue?

Start out getting to the Beltway on a late Friday afternoon..  At first from down US-50, later (when I got my head out of my ass) via I-66.  Then the Beltway around to I-270.  Around exit 22, the cell phone would drop out and start roaming, at a time when a roaming call might well have a material impact on whether I could make rent.  But I had to have it on anyway, because I wanted to live a life where I needed a mobile phone.

Then onto I-70 west, headed toward Pennsylvania.  After about two and a half hours on the road, down the ramps into Breezewood – the Las Vegas of Central Pennsylvania, the Town of Motels, and technically the home of stoplights on I-70 before it joins the Pennsylvania Turnpike. At this point, it’s been about two and a half hours, most likely, and it’s time to stop.  And it’s not like Breezewood lacks for truck stops.  Break the seal, take a leak, stretch your legs, buy some more Dr Pepper (and if you’re really feeling weird, maybe some cheap-ass cigars with wood tips), and basically load up for the next round….which is going to be four hours on the turnpike.

The Allegheny Tunnel is a checkpoint, looming out of a mountain – and on a snowy night, its lights through the precipitation may be the first real sign that oh God it’s really snowing out there, not like a dusting that shuts a Southern city down and empties the Piggly Wiggly of bread and milk, that’s REAL SNOW.  And after that, it’s just a drive.  Maybe stop somewhere around Cranberry at the service plaza – there’s Burger King there, maybe a late night double bacon cheeseburger and some more Dr Pepper will help finish the push on to Ohio, where eventually the turnpike will change places with I-80 and you’ll free-roll from I-76 to I-77.

Seven hours one way, with stops, and you have to do it with stops.  And tolls.  If you really go balls out after work, or your boss lets you slide early, you might make it by 12:30 AM, but it’s more likely to be 1.

And then, about forty hours later, you’ll set out the opposite direction around 5 PM in hopes of making it home by midnight.  It’s dark by the time you reach the Pennsylvania border, counting the change in your tray to make sure you have enough to get by, trying to calculate whether you need gas at the service plazas or can wait until you’re back past Breezewood the other way.  Fries for dinner, probably, and then the Allegheny Tunnel from the opposite direction, this time across a long and broad and barren landscape…then down through the mountain passes to Breezewood.  And from there, you’re still looking at over two hours home.

The problem with driving almost fourteen hours in a weekend by yourself is it leaves you alone with your thoughts.  The wrong tapes in the car stereo will only feed the introspection and melancholy, especially if your life has been summarily imploded and completely rearranged in the last eight months, and there’s only so much distraction to get from the occasional clear-channel-AM broadcast of an NFL game.  There’s a real danger in getting too much into your own head…a little luck and a little insanity are important in life, but only a fool relies on either.

 

The BCS matchups are made, and no one is happy outside the Dirty Coast.  LSU-Alabama is the least of the controversy; somehow a Virginia Tech team that got clubbed twice by Clemson is going to the Sugar Bowl to take on a Michigan team that got in ahead of a Michigan State squad that beat them head-to-head and sported a better conference record and identical overall mark – and played within a field goal of winning the Big Ten title game.  Meanwhile, Boise State and Kansas State go begging despite finishing 7th and 8th in the final BCS standings, and West Virginia proves why the Big East has never deserved an automatic berth by slipping in at #23 to take on Clemson.

Once again, the annual breakdown of What Would Happen Back In The Day:

ROSE BOWL:  Oregon-Michigan State.  None of your damned playoff games here; Michigan State wins the Big Ten at 7-1 and thus gets the ticket to Pasadena.  This should be a hot one; there might not be a more exciting team than Oregon but nobody answers the bell in big games like the Spartans.

SUGAR BOWL: LSU-Stanford.  Andrew Luck vs the Honey Badger.  You’d watch this, and so would all nine Cardinal fans.

ORANGE BOWL: Oklahoma State-Alabama.  2 vs 3 for the right to be champion if LSU faceplants.  Again, I don’t know where Okie Lite thinks they’re going to find any points against that defense.

COTTON BOWL: Arkansas-Boise State.  Better upgrade the scoreboard software.

FIESTA BOWL: Kansas State-Clemson in the battle of nobody gives a shit, because Fuck Clemson.*

CITRUS BOWL: Wisconsin vs South Carolina.  That badger is going to kill somebody.

And there’s your national championship picture.  LSU can win out by beating a 1-loss team ranked #4.  Or it can lose and the winner of Bama-Ok State can grab the ring.  Unless they look unimpressive while Stanford positively thrashes LSU (don’t make me laugh, their non-cons were Duke and San Jose State).  Meanwhile, we get some really good games to pass the time during the Moveable Feast, which itself has moved to January 2 this year so I don’t annoy the hell out of all the hungover guests the morning after the party.

Once again, we’d all be better off if the BCS never existed and we went back to how things were in 1990.  But if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a couple of years, you know this song already…

 

 

* Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson each get a nickel.

Everybody gets paid today.  James Franklin’s contract is “torn up” according to Vice Chancellor David Williams, who always looks as if he should be sipping on 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle neat while smoking a cigar the size of a telephone pole.  Details of the contract are not forthcoming, but it should be sufficient to ward off the rumormongering of other coaches while ensuring that Coach Franklin’s kids will be able to wake up Christmas morning and unwrap the GI Joe with the kung-fu grip.

More to the point, everybody gets something.  Assistant coaches all get raises.  Players get a new indoor practice facility, built big and wide with resources for other teams as well – and all Vandy athletes get to chow down at the Magic Man’s new and improved dining hall.  Ticketholders get a new jumbotron and a complete review of the stadium situation with an eye toward all manner of improvements.  Hell, the money is echoing so loudly that former ‘Dore wideout Earl Bennett even got a 4-year $18M extension in Chicago.

But most of all, Vanderbilt football fans get hope – the hope that goes with the biggest university commitment to the SEC’s flagship sport since the retirement of Dangerous Dan McGugin.  VCDW looked ready to wade into the crowd of media and start throwing punches as he flatly declared “We’re not talking about the past.  We’re building the damn thing.”  Coach himself was up there making the same pitch he made from day one – Ivy League education, SEC football, the city of Nashville and the opportunity to play right away – and you can almost see him looking straight at the likes of Gunner Kiel when he says it.  Come with us, he says, and you can be part of the legend.

So will it work? Will the fans pack the house?  Will we sell out the bowl game and season tickets as requested? It’s tempting to think we could, but that dream is tempered by the experience of seeing a Stanford team, ranked in the top 6 with a Heisman-caliber QB and a BCS bowl berth already slotted, playing their last home game with tickets being handed out four-for-free to faculty, staff, students, and military – and not filling a 55,000 seat stadium for a conference foe.

I’m hoping Vanderbilt is different.  Sure, there’s also Nashville-based NFL ball, which honestly sucks up most of the footballing oxygen for non-alumni in the Bay Area, but Nashville is also in the heart of SEC country, where alumni status is the last thing you worry about in supporting a team.  Roll a successful squad out there for a couple of years in a football-crazed part of the world, and people are bound to at least pay attention, not least when coupled to the novelty of a top-20 academic school making top-20 football noise.

But there’ll be time enough to worry about that.  Twelve months ago, we found a ray of hope in the most hopeless place.  Now, in what should be the bleak midwinter, it’s raining nothing but sunshine.

Brand. New. Vanderbilt.

…because the travails of the Commodores have basically carried NaBloPoMo this year.  Apologies to the maybe three people actually reading this blog, who are probably all sick to death of Anchor Down and Who Ya Wit. ;]

Christmas season is upon us.  Lights are around the trees, peppermint mocha is in every coffee purveyor’s establishment, I came downstairs this morning and the tree was decorated, and right on time, the Killers have released this year’s Christmas track. “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball” is a rootin’-tootin’ Western-influenced two-stepper, as you might expect, and you can really see the influence of Brandon Flowers’ Nevada-centric solo album from last year.  I’m about ready for them to get back in the studio and get to work on a fourth full album already.

Another nice touch is that the whole collection of Christmas tracks, one annually since 2006, is now available as an EP “album” from the iTunes Music Store in aid of World AIDS Day tomorrow.  I’ve written previously about “Joseph, Better You Than Me”, and last year’s single “Boots” was as perfect a melancholy slice of “you can’t go home again” as the season calls for.  Because Christmas, more than any other holiday, always brings with it the memory of days gone by and the bitter truth that things aren’t how they used to be.

This year, though, I’m going to try to focus on having a good holiday season.  These are the things you can normally only tell in retrospect, but I think I knew in 2008 that it was going to be a good one, with a job change coming up and Vanderbilt going to a bowl and not having to get on a plane in December.  2009 was less so, although that’s probably down to spending eight straight days in Alabama, and 2007 or 2010…well, that didn’t go well.

This year I’m reminded of 2006.  We did things, for sure, but in a lot of ways it was the year of the dull moment, of being settled into routine.  Perhaps coincidentally, it’s also the last time we took in a lodger.  Having other people around is good for conversation, good for help with the chores, good for occasionally sitting down to family dinner, and – in my case – good for the indulgence of football and vice.  Even if the vice has transitioned from whiskey and cigars to the casual Old Fashioned after finishing the dishes. (I’m still owed one, just for the record, and I intend to take it this evening if possible.)

My choice this year is to embrace the holiday.  Smother in it.  Go ahead and drink those peppermint mochas and sweat the cholesterol after first of the year.  Go ahead and start playing the Christmas songs the week of Thanksgiving while still at work, even the weird obscure British stuff about holly and the bleak midwinter and all those things that sound more like they ought to be part of a service at some Oxford chapel about six hundred years ago.  Hell, go for that first.  Keep creating confusion around presents to ensure some sense of surprise at what you actually get to open on the 25th.  Go to the parties.  Watch the movies.  Soak up the moment, every moment, and worry about the future when it gets here.

Easier said than done, I know, but I’m going to give it a shot nonetheless.

I have made no secret over the years of how the words “please advise” as a sentence by themselves make me reach for my revolver.  And I don’t even have a revolver, despite my insistence over the years that tech support staff should be dressed like the Stig and armed to discourage random grabbing in hallways or cafeterias or bathrooms (not kidding).  The warning for IT staff should be like the warning posted behind MUNI drivers in San Francisco: “Information Gladly Given But Safety Requires Avoiding Unnecessary Conversation.”

The use of words and jargon outside their industry goes beyond the annoyance of people who say things like “a software”, though.  Take actual laboratory science, for instance, where the word “theory” has a very specific meaning.  Unfortunately, the rest of the world uses “theory” like scientists use “hypothesis” and that’s how we get the disdain of the holy rollers and their anti-intellectual enablers for things like “evolution is only a theory” or “global warming is only a theory.”

One problem we’ve experienced in every place I’ve ever worked stems from the rise of Mac OS X, a UNIX-alike multiuser system (as opposed to the old-style MacOS/DOS/BeOS single-user turn-it-on-and-go model).  We always run into problems over the fact that users invariably want “administrative rights.”  Now, in UNIX, the word “rights” has a very specific meaning in terms of defining what any given user (itself a word fraught with meaning, as it refers to an account rather than an individual) is capable of doing to a file or directory on a specific UNIX system.  I argued for years at my first job that we should avoid using the word “rights” simply because it was idiotic to provide any sort of nurture to the idea that any randomly selected person behind a desk should have final say over a company-owned resource, including the ability to lock out the IT department tasked with the support of the system.

Now, we find ourselves in a similar spot, a continent away: the combination of company policy and federal privacy and data security requirements will probably require us, at some point in the near future, to start messing around with the constellation of privileges for end-user accounts.  The problem is, this toothpaste is surpassing difficult to get back into the tube.  For one thing, there’s the prospect of laptop users running into problems while out and about that can’t be solved without administrative access (oddball networking issue?  Weird printer driver install?)  For another, there’s the added layer of difficulty with having to invoke support for heretofore routine tasks (are we going to have to walk around and run Software Update every week now?  Or do it through Remote Desktop? Are we going to staff up to meet the demand?)

The real problem, of course, is that there are occasional users who are very capable and self-sufficient and can be trusted not to do anything stupid to burn their computer down.  There are also people who call you up asking for “a software” that somebody told them will solve all their problems – you know, the ones who tend to have four toolbars installed in Internet Explorer.  Crafting a one-size-fits-all policy isn’t particularly good, but even more difficult is creating a mechanism by which the right people can get the right privileges while the people with their hands in the paste pot are prevented from doing anything foolish.  And worst of all are the toy-boys who want to run things like private VPN and remote control software and then put them on other folks’ computers as well.

Like it or not, if you’re going to run an IT environment with a limited support budget and staff, your only resort is to go full-on black shirt.  Lock everything down beyond belief and start unlocking only the things people need as they need them, until you hit some sort of equilibrium.  And ideally put folks on Macs with ARD, to make your life easier in terms of malware and stupid-ware.

Or you could just start handing out revolvers.

If any proof were needed that the Occupy Wall Street movement has lost the plot, it was on offer Friday afternoon in San Francisco.  Traffic ground to a halt around Union Square as a crowd of protestors – complete with signs and drums, of course – camped out in the intersection of Post and Powell, which naturally provoked a chorus of car horns and not a small bit of opprobrium from shoppers.  Meanwhile, three cops on horseback rolled their eyes, but otherwise stood there doing nothing.  So what was being protested?  There were a few signs about “BUY NOTHING” and general anti-corporatist rage, and Black Friday is certainly the right time for such as that, but is that what the Occupy movement is about now?  Because if it is, Ed Earl Brown has tuned out.

You remember Ed Earl Brown, our notional middle-American.  He’s in dire straits, he’s underemployed, the wife’s barely keeping food on the table, the house is upside down and the mortgage isn’t great.  You know why Ed Earl’s wife was at Wal-Mart at stupid o’clock Friday morning?  Because the only way to make the Christmas dollars go far enough is to head down to the annual cattle run for $200 flat screens and hope not to get trampled, tased or pepper-sprayed.  Yes, kids, it’s bloodsport on Black Friday these days.

Ed Earl has a vague sense that something is very wrong with this country, that things have gone off the rails, that it shouldn’t be this way, that the deck is somehow stacked in favor of everyone who already has money.  Ed Earl would like to see Wells Fargo get theirs, or Bank of America, or one of these other financial entities that went to Vegas for a decade, got Uncle Sam to make them whole, and promptly turned on their own customers to squeeze them until the pips are squeaking, as if Matthew 18:25-35 were never written. (Look it up, you heathens.)

But Ed Earl does not identify with a bunch of bong-watered granola-shavers getting into fights with the cops.  Ed Earl is not down for the destruction of capitalism.  And if you ask Ed Earl what the Occupy movement is about, he’s probably not going to be able to tell you other than it looks like a bunch of hippies.

This is the shortcoming of OWS.  They rejected any idea that they should have a set of demands, which is fine – but they also failed to deliver a clear, sound-bite-friendly summation of their grievances.  And spare me the complaining about sound bites; if Our Lord could deliver a summation of Christianity in twenty-five words in John 3:16, nobody else has any excuse.  Come to think of it, if every OWS-related protest was waving signs that just said “MATTHEW 18:25-35” it would make a universe of difference in terms of perception and messaging.  But how hard is it to say “the banks got bailed out and went right back to doing the same things as always”?  How hard it is to find people who got baited-and-switched on mortgages, or improperly foreclosed on by banks who were crying to Uncle Sam with their hats in their hands three years ago?  How hard is it to keep the spotlight on the shenanigans of the financial sector and how there has been no accounting for their role in tanking the economy?

But no matter, the plot is well and truly lost.  Thanks to the usual suspects and their ill-informed amen corner in the professionally indignant left (looking at you, Naomi Wolf), it’s the age old hippies vs. cops tale, and the hippies are always going to lose that one.  The only thing turning the tide are the optics of UC-Davis campus police hosing down unarmed seated kids (with tuition-paying parents) with military-grade OC spray, and naturally the apologists of Fox are comparing it to a condiment. As opposed to contemplating the idea that local governments have militarized their police departments in the name of a “war on crime/drugs/whatever” that would give any actual anti-government true believer the screaming purple fits.  I mean, if you really do fear your government, wouldn’t you be a little concerned that the old-school revolver and billy club have been replaced with tasers AND pepper spray AND metal batons AND semiauto pistols with multiple magazines and over fifty rounds of ammo AND carbines or even submachine guns in the trunk of the car?  The pant-shitting militia types never seem to be bent out of shape over the fact that the local cop on the beat has a bigger and broader array of firepower than any workaday federal agent.

Long story short: the infinite distractability of the American public continues to act in the service of the 1%.  Anyone can tell you what’s wrong with this country, but nobody can focus long enough to do something about it.

I have a couple or three topics to write on, but they all deserve more attention than I can give them at 8 PM on a Sunday night.  Maybe tomorrow I can gin something up.  In the meantime, I’m working on my playlists and my wish list.  It’s amazing what an optimistic turn the music takes when Vandy is headed for a bowl (although I don’t think I appreciated the fact in 2008 that we actually went .500 in conference).  It’s also noteworthy that my age-old plan – win all four non-conf games plus Ole Miss and Kentucky and that’s Big Six – worked out exactly like that this year.

As for presents this year, I don’t know – I pretty much have everything I need and there aren’t many things I want.  Maybe a new pair of boots, definitely some Brooks Brothers Vandy gear, that watch I’ve been eyeing (although that might make a more appropriate thing for my 40th birthday, come to think of it) – to be honest, all I want for Christmas in 2011 is as happy a Christmas season as I had in 2008.  I definitely feel more optimistic about the football than I did then – you can read the post and see that I didn’t feel we’d turned the corner – and I’m happier with the iPhone as an all-everything solution than I was then (although long-form text entry is still a bugaboo, and ESPN3 has been added to that).  And I did break down and buy more outerwear – that was the December I acquired “Vandy III”, my old reliable Columbia soft-shell.

One thing’s for sure – the netbook desire of 2008 has been quashed for good and turned into notional-iPad-3 desire…

We didn’t buy in at first.

You can go back through the archives of the Vanderbilt blogosphere in December 2010 and see that we were…less than enthusiastic about the hiring of James Franklin.  Much of the disappointment, obviously, stemmed from the thought that we had (allegedly) thrown $21 million over 7 years at Gus Malzahn and been turned down, and some of it stemmed from the apparent lack of success in recent years for Maryland.  I knew Friedgen was on the way out, thanks to my DC pals, and the fact that they flaked on Franklin’s head-coach-in-waiting deal was discouraging.  There were questions about play-calling, there were questions about recruiting, and there was a general sense of malaise over the fact that once again, we went out and got somebody else’s coordinator instead of a known good proven BCS-conference coach.

What a difference a year makes.

From the first press conference, it looked like we had a winner.  From his first recruiting haul, it was apparent that he knew how to bring guys into the fold.  And tonight, at 6-6 in his first year, the most successful new Vanderbilt football coach in generations, it looks like James Franklin can coach.

Yes, we were 6-6 in 2008.  But this is a very different team.  We won in 2008 by playing teams close, no penalties, no turnovers, and just hanging around for sixty minutes.  When we won, we won close, and when we lost, we lost ugly.  This year, five of our six wins were by three touchdowns or more. Read that sentence again.  In our six losses, four were lost by a margin of six points or less. Read that sentence again.  Now consider this: one catch against Georgia, one fumble not lost against Arkansas, one field goal made and one of theirs missed at Florida, and one field goal made at Tennessee, and this team finishes the regular season 10-2, 6-2 in the conference, and – on the tiebreak – SEC East champion with a game next week against LSU.

This team, in one season, with almost the same players as last year, was five plays away from the SEC Championship Game.

Vice-Chancellor David Williams, it is said, was dialed in on James Franklin from the beginning.  And he was questioned for it.  In the cold light of midnight, it has to be said: his judgement is impeccable.

Well, a side trip to Best Buy on Wednesday yielded up a second Kindle Fire on a back display that was NOT in “display only” mode.  More remarkably, the Wi-Fi was on and working and connected.  So I was able to actually take a pass at the web browser and see what’s doing.

It’s tough to make a solid evaluation in five minutes, but the browser seems to be within acceptable parameters.  It didn’t blow me away or anything, but it didn’t drag excessively or struggle with my usual array of websites.  There were a couple of rendering errors, but those were readily attributable to the ad-blocking on the in-store network.

The thing I keep coming back to is the lack of radio options – no Bluetooth (so no cheating with a keyboard for text input), no GPS (so no reliable mapping software), and no 3G (so stuck with whatever Wi-Fi is on offer).  What you have at that point is a slightly larger color display – which might be fine in conjunction with an iPhone as a larger reader, except that I already have the regular Kindle for reading purposes.  And the availability of e-ink for battery life and contrast/readability means that I would be on very thin ice to justify making a run at a Fire when I know that a notional iPad 3 would almost certainly serve me as a personal-laptop replacement.

I think I’ll withhold judgement on the Fire until after the holiday season so we can see what the long-tern performance is like (I especially want to see how buggy the fork of Android 2.3 is or isn’t).  But for now, it’s still not for me – I think the final sweet spot is still going to be 32 GB 3G-capable iPad for $730 rather than 4GB/128GB 11″ MBA for $1150.

Well, if I had to pare it down, it boils down to:

1) Cuz and Blue Tarp, the relatives who are actually family, and who have now lived with us for four months.  It’s not going to last, because they’ll need their own place in the city, but for now I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth – family dinner, cocktail hours, and an infusion of youth and enthusiasm that we’re glad to mooch from.

2) Anchor of Gold, the Vanderbilt SBNation blog that gave me a spot on the masthead and made me a sportswriter for the first time in seventeen years.  And while I’m at it, Vanderbilt athletics generally, for making the leap in multiple sports.  College World Series, top-ten basketball, and now a football team on the way up.

3) Apple products, which have given me a living ever since washing out of grad school.

4) ‘Er indoors, who brings home the bacon AND fries it up in the pan.  Love you, sugar.

5) I’m exceptionally thankful for the fact that we’re not going to be getting on a plane this holiday season.  For many reasons.