Are my eyes really blue?

Shocker.  The “General Strike” in Oakland leads to assorted vandalism, sporadic violence, a march to shut down the port of Oakland, and a whole lot of confusion.  Not least of which is “what the very fuck is going on?”

Because the plot has been lost.  Make no mistake, the whole point of the Occupy movement is now up for grabs.  The International Longshore Workers Union is standing around debating whether or not they should be forcing their way into the port or honoring the strike, and believe me when I say that the Occupy kids want no part of crossing the ILWU, which has a long memory regarding another general strike.  At the very least, the modern “movement” should be aware of why the ports on the West Coast still shut down every year on July 5.  Hint: it’s not a paid holiday.

Marching, police activity, all we need now is the tired Buffalo Springfield soundtrack.  Because this has been neatly forced into the same paradigm as every other mass action for the last forty years.  This needed to happen in a very different way if people were going to be motivated.  It needed to be somewhere far from the Bay Area, quite frankly, and it needed to involve people who will generate empathy in Peoria and Kansas City and Jasper and Trenton and Buffalo.  The minute it’s possible for the mass media to shove this whole thing into the giant overstuffed box marked “HIPPIE SHIT,” the rest of the country – the legions of downwardly-mobile middle-class Americans done wrong by the financial shenanigans of the last decade – ceases to identify with the movement.

Maybe it’s not right, maybe it’s not fair, but it’s reality.  Spare me the diatribes about “false consciousness”.  I’m sure that goes down a treat in Boulder or Santa Cruz, but that’s not where this needs to resonate.  Ed Earl Brown, who can’t find a job that pays what he used to get and whose wife is struggling to keep the kids fed and whose house is upside down 50% and who’s one bad month away from getting his base-model F-150 repossessed and whose biggest joy in life is going to be if LSU breaks through Saturday against Bama – if Ed Earl doesn’t identify with the Occupy movement, the then Occupy movement has blown it.

It might just be possible to salvage this shit, but it’s going to take some doing.  Clean up.  Dress like ordinary folks from Middle America. Tell the bedraggled potheads with the END CAPITALISM banner to fuck off back to the dorms. Focus – heavily – on the financial sector, the people who make billions on a glorified shell game, the ones who begged to be rescued by the Feds only to turn around and drop the hammer on ordinary people who needed the same thing.  I’m mainly thinking here of Rick Santelli’s infamous CNBC raveout a month into the Obama administration, and thinking of Matthew 18: 23-34, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that once upon a time I was really fucking good at this shit.

It’s about time for me to return the 13″ MacBook Air to its rightful owner – my boss – and I have come to some firm conclusions.

1) My next work computer must be a 13″ MBA.  No ifs, ands or buts – I need the reduced weight in my bag and the speed and performance are outstanding, not to mention the battery life.  Hell, the i5 processor and only 128 GB of storage are sufficient.

2) While I could sure use a portable of my own, right now the move is to wait for the notional iPad 3.  Basically on the pretense that innovations seem to move back and forth between devices.  Just as the iPhone 4 got the original iPad’s A4 processor, and the iPad 2 got the iPhone 4’s FaceTime camera, and the iPhone 4S got the iPad 2’s A5 processor, I’m hoping that the (wholly theoretical) iPad three will include a faster processor, support for Siri, and (most of all) the ability to go on AT&T or Verizon with the same hardware, which would mean I could use Verizon in the States and still get GSM service abroad.  Hopefully by then, we’ll have versions of SBNation and WatchESPN that work with iPad and UVerse respectively – the presence of Prompt and Spaces on the iPad have been a real leap forward in terms of “good enough” viability in case I had to try to do work on the bloody thing.

3) In the meantime, the combination of the iPhone 4 (running iOS 5) and the Kindle 3 (keyboarded with 3G) make a fairly decent personal solution.  The screen of the iPhone is no great shakes for watching video, obviously, and my battery may start giving out sooner rather than later, but the iPhone is still the indispensable device.  And the Kindle (freshly warranty-replaced) still has the browser, which is perfectly viable for RSS and Twitter – with the ace in the hole of unlimited free 3G access.  A great solution for those long winter walks around San Francisco when I need reading material whilst sat in the cafe or the dive bar, without having to carry a bag.  In fact, I intend to try that combo this very night, albeit not in the city, because the temps are finally turning autumnal.  It’s kind of a drag having summer last from August through Halloween, but that’s the price we pay for no mosquitos/hurricanes/tornadoes/Vols/etc etc.

All right.  Two down, twenty-eight to go.  I will make this work, you’ll see…

Read this bit first.

So it’s happening this weekend – thanks to another bad lease deal, the 4Ps will suffer the same fate as Dan Brown’s Lounge, and be turfed out in favor of some other big-ticket joint, and another piece of my past will go missing.  And make no mistake, this is a big piece.  Not least because it was everything.  It was where we celebrated when good things happened.  It was where we mourned when bad things happened.  It was where we took guests from out of town to show them a good time.  It was where we went to get away from it all and get lost in the smoke and the jukebox and the beer and the song and the potato soup.

It was, in short, the place I’d always wanted my whole life.  If you really reach, you could have made a case for the Overcup or the Villager at Vanderbilt, and some interesting things happened at Sign of the Whale in the boom era, but make no mistake: for four and a half years, Ireland’s Four Provinces was The Bar. The place where the action is. The place where We hung out, the place where We belonged, the place where there was a We.

And the more I think of it, the more I know I don’t actually want to go back one last time.  I did that last year, and we closed the joint again, and a great night was had by all – but I don’t know if I could bear it knowing it would be the last time.  I’d much rather remember how it was, and hope against hope that maybe that really is the afterlife: the snowy night outside, with my best girl and my best friends inside, at a table full of food and Guinness, and more friends coming through the door, and it’s 11 PM and the McTeggarts are just starting the third set with “On The One Road”…for eternity.

 

NB: this is day one of NaBloPoMo, in which I attempt to blog something every day for a month.  Hell, I’m not going through NaNoWriMo again without a MacBook Air.

I have reached an age and a station where there’s not that much on my radar as presents go.  I’m pushing forty (dragging thirty!  DRAGGING THIRTY!) and I don’t have any kids, and the things I want most in the world aren’t really things I can have – or at the very least, they’re not things that I can stick on an Amazon wish list.  (I suppose if I had ridiculous 9-figure money, I could buy myself a Vanderbilt ride to the Sugar Bowl, but things like a do-over on undergrad or a sudden onset of sanity in the old country aren’t on offer.)

So what’s left?  This is an even more pronounced issue with a big birthday coming up sooner than later, but it’s not like I can even decide what I want to do to “celebrate” the great odometer rollover (although the series of blog posts is already in pre-production, don’t think it isn’t).  The real issue is that, you know, I’ve got a little money and I’m doing all right.  So anything under thirty dollars is probably something I’ve already bought myself, and the kinds of things I’d like to save up for are too costly for a present to make that much difference on – I mean, a night out at Bourbon and Branch is easily funded as a gift, but two weeks walking the Cotswold Way, not so much.

Right now, the things of foolishness currently occupying my list mostly revolve around the new Brooks Brothers line of Vanderbilt apparel.  I need a new dress shirt in the worst way, and since BB makes some of the best out there, one or two with the school logo on the cuff wouldn’t be the worst thing to get by a long shot. I hear they also do a very nice Vandy polo shirt, complete with black-on-black logo so it doesn’t look quite so prep-tastic. (If I had a truly ridiculous sum of money to hand, I wouldn’t mind overhauling my entire wardrobe with a nice selection of bespoke and tailored things of the sort that scream “Vandy lifestyle” – but if I had that kind of money, it wouldn’t be a problem.)

There’s a watch on the list – I know, I know, but this one is an automatic self-winding number from a small purveyor of government contracted goods, and it’s completely without logo or branding of any kind.  Basically, I could wear it for the next forty years without ever buying a battery – and there’s something about owning a completely mechanical, completely unbranded, completely superfluous accessory that would last the rest of my life…I don’t know, but there’s an appeal there to something in the kind of character I’d like to be.

As superfluities go, for that matter, there’s always the new waterproof Palladiums – which might just make a viable alternative to the endless parade of DMs I’ve worn for over a decade.  Not that I want to get away from my Docs, but something else might make a nice change of pace, and the ultralights I bought earlier this year were the perfect summer footwear all season.  Again, something about the “urban explorer” vibe of the revived Palladium pings something in the back of my head about what I’d like to be doing; this is where you go to Wikipedia and look up the word “flaneur”.  I guess this is where the Carharrt donkey coat, or the SeV outback jacket that holds an iPad, would come into play…

And that’s where things really trip up.  Because at the moment, there’s no telling when I’ll end up reworking my laptop situation at the office, let alone my cell phone situation.  And at some point, I may wind up having to purchase a portable computing solution of some sort, and right now everything is on hold until we see how viable the Kindle Fire is.  But I’m not fooling myself that I could blog on it, even assuming I wanted to…for that matter, I’ve not attempted Anchor of Gold blogging through the web interface on a non-laptop portable.  And above all, I don’t know what the shelf life of the modern tablet is, and I’m not persuaded it matches the three years minimum I expect of a laptop (and let’s be honest, probably more if I have to front the cost myself…and how long can we expect a MacBook Air to be viable?  Not three years I bet).

Hell, maybe everyone should just give me money and then enjoy the spectacle of me fretting about what unnecessary thing I should blow it on.  At least there’s entertainment value in that.  After all, I just churned out 800 words on what may be the Platonic ideal of first world problems – the comic potential of me agonizing over a gift card for six months is bound to pass some of the time, right?

The whole point, the whole appeal, of the Occupy Wall Street movement was “99%.”  Everyone is suffering.  Ordinary non-political mainstream Americans.  People who are just living their lives and playing by the rules and getting screwed by the beneficiaries of the Whiffle Life.

And yet, out here in the Bay Area at least, the wrong sort of people are taking over.  Occupy SF is getting costumed visits from Critical Massholes.*  Occupy Oakland is getting speeches from Michael Moore.**  And the kind of people who need to be behind the movement are going to look at it and see the usual suspects of the Professional Indignant Left – and the punditocracy will not hesitate to lump Occupy in with the usual suspects – the pot-bedraggled-Free Mumia-International ANSWER-ginormous puppet-crowd that helped paint opposition to the Iraq War as the province of Dirty Fucking Hippies.

If the people who really want to protest what’s happened in this country could be compelled to turn out in khakis and polo shirts, and lash out at things like Bank of America debit card fees and illegal foreclosures by banks that were bailed out with taxpayer money and failing CEOs getting one golden parachute after another, and if the Telegraph Avenue burnouts could stay home and shut up for once, it would only take a few weeks for Middle America to identify with the movement and wonder why we haven’t started stringing up hedge fund managers.

But as soon as the Professional Indignant Left gets themselves front and center, they become the story, and they become the face of the movement, and ordinary Americans don’t want to identify with them anymore.  And that’s how the 1% get away with it.  That’s how it worked in Alabama in the 1920s, that’s how it works in Alabama today, that’s what the GOP has attempted to nationalize in the last few decades, and on the available evidence you have to think it’s working out for them so far.

So bury the affinity groups, put out the fucking joints, burn the Chomksy and wash your fucking hair, and try to make Ed Earl Turnipseed feel like you’re one of him.  Unless, as always, you’d rather be right than win.  God, I miss Bill Clinton.***

 

 

* Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with Critical Mass that couldn’t be fixed with a couple of automatic rifles.  I’m sick of people who don’t understand what civil disobedience means – from either direction.

** Michael Moore needs to be sewn in a sack and dropped off the Bay Bridge.  No one who seriously argued that there was no difference between George Bush and Al Gore should be treated as anything other than a retard, let alone given any sort of credibility as a political figure.  You fuck up like that, you don’t get to play anymore.

*** It’s not too late for the Big Dog to be put in charge of Obama 2012.

The memorials and eulogies and etc. for Steve Jobs have been plentiful and well-deserved.  Everyone is in awe of the iOS era, and to some extent of the iPod (still!), and everyone says that he “saved Apple,” which he certainly did.  But I don’t know how much people think about just what sort of state Apple was in.

I came on board in summer of 1994, with a Power Mac 6100AV that I bought in advance of starting grad school.  I’d wanted a Mac for a while, and the decision to go with a desktop over a laptop was a tough one until I realized that it would mean the difference between a 68K processor (past) and a PowerPC one (future, or at least futureproof).  And so it was that I wound up with the whole kit and kaboodle.  The 14″ monitor with the speakers underneath and the microphone built in, connected to that weird thick port on back of the pizza box.  System 7.1.2, back when the operating system was just called System.  And a Geoport Telecom Adapter, using some of the already-overtaxed CPU to handle the model dialup connection – which, in my case, meant using Apple Remote Access to establish a connection to the school network.

It could have been worse, to be honest – not that many people were dialing in on ARA, so I usually had as good a connection as the 14.4kbps modem emulation could provide me.  But this was an era when TCP/IP wasn’t actually part of the operating system.  I remember trying to get MacTCP working, and arguments over beers at the Garages over Thanksgiving break as to whether SLIP or PPP was a better way to try to get online, while I was dutifully logging into eWorld for Monday Night Football chat.

Salvation was going to come in 7.5.  Or with Open Transport.  Or with OpenDoc.  Or with CHRP-based clone hardware.  It seemed like everything on God’s green earth was being thrown at the wall in the hopes that something would stick long enough to be the miracle that brought everyone charging back into the Apple fold.  Every month, MacWorld or MacUser had details about some new thing – some preview of Copeland, or some new frogdesign concept for a new-look Macintosh incorporating Bluetooth peripherals, or a new line of Power Computing clones that ran faster than anything coming out of Cupertino.  MacWorld Boston, or MacWorld San Francisco, or Seybold – an endless stream of Photoshop bake-offs and promises of new things to come.

None of it worked, of course. Cyberdog was interesting – and one of its most knowledgable authorities wound up best man at my wedding – and things like the Apple Open Collaboration Environment had promise, albeit in a world of LAN-based networking quickly swamped by the Internet.  I never really got round to using my computer as the answering machine.  Similarly, Claris eMailer never really displaced Eudora (except a few years later, briefly, as Outlook Express for Mac), and the clones only serves to cannibalize the existing Mac line.  CHRP and PREP didn’t amount to anything, as nobody really wanted to dual-boot Mac OS and Windows NT on a PowerPC system.

Apple was a mess.  And within two years of Steve’s return, the product line was simple: PowerMac, PowerBook, iMac, iBook.  And to this day, that’s pretty much how the Mac side of things looks: a desktop and a laptop each, for consumer and pro markets.  Simple, self-replacing, non-proliferating (God only knows how many Performa models there were by 1998) – pick something to do and do it right.  And embrace standards – USB,TCP/IP, POP/SMTP, no more proprietary nonsense.  Today, you won’t find a single port on a MacBook that you can’t find on any other laptop, except for the new standard by Intel originally called LightPeak – which Apple now markets as Thunderbolt.

Apple stands for simple computing.  Fortunately, Steve had the chops and the sense to simplify Apple.

It’s not difficult to see a line of connection between the baseball owners in 1994 complaining about “economic uncertainty” and the various one-percenters* of the business community making the same complaint today.  Both were after the same thing: a guarantee that they would continue to make ever more money, irrespective of how bad they were at managing what they owned.  Bankers who took a huge federal bailout and then insist that regulation is the greatest threat to economic growth sound suspiciously like small-market owners who shelled out ridiculous contracts only to demand salary caps and revenue sharing.

Really, it’s PJ O’Rourke’s “whiffle life” again: the belief of the upper class that they should enjoy perpetual immunity from the consequences of their actions.  Must be nice.

 

* In years gone by, motorcycle enthusiasts insisted that they were perfectly respectable people and that the “outlaw biker” thug image represented maybe one percent of bikers.  Which in turn led certain biker gangs to start wearing a patch that merely said “1%”.  So if you ever wander into a bar and see a lot of those patches, I hope you wore your steel-toes, because you’re in for a rough night…

After a week and a half with the 11″ MacBook Air (thanks to the good offices of the Worldwide Product Marketing seed pool), I have changed my mind yet again. I think the 11″ model could actually be a very viable workplace machine for me – sure, the display is a little cramped, but (at least from my main desk) it’s a piece of cake to attach an external display and boom, off to the races. In fact, most of my usual squats at work feature a loose display one place or another. The main appeal is that this thing weights two and a half pounds – I think my first cellphone weight about that much – and is just wicked quick.

Something I hadn’t considered is the ergonomics of the thing. Sure, I say all the time that typing on glass isn’t a great idea, but how much easier is it to have the laptop in your lap for reading things? If you’re stretched out with your feet propped up and the thing in your lap, it’s a lot easier to watch the screen than it is to prop up an iPad somehow.

Battery life is a bit of a concern. I’ve established that with my normal real-world use, I can only expect about 4 hours of battery life (now in fairness, that has included more than a little Flash video thanks to WatchESPN.com). Might be time to activate the free trial of Hulu Plus and see how the iPad stacks up in terms of streaming video. Worth noting: this is the i5 processor MBA with 4 GB of RAM, and it hasn’t struggled with anything.

Bottom line: the 13″ MBA is probably a better all-around choice for work, even with the i5 and especially re: battery life, but I wouldn’t be heartbroken if I got the 11″ instead – and if I were buying for personal use, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the 11″. For all the emphasis on phones and pads, Apple laptops still lead the way.

EDITED 10/20: however, it bears noting that a first-gen iPad running iOS 5 depletes its battery at half the pace of an 11″ MBA running the same six apps, and is far easier to use with one hand when having platelets needled out of your arm. Kind of back to square one. 🙂

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

So here we are, sitting at 3-3 coming into the Army game for Homecoming.  I think we are sitting exactly where most folks expected us to be – winning the first three at home and then dropping two tough road games.  As for the Georgia game, I think most people would say it was a competitive loss, certainly more so than the two preceding it – and in all three games, a touchdown in the last minute of the first half obscures a pretty good 29 minutes of football in adverse conditions.
Worthwhile to consider the wins, too.  While we always should have beaten Elon – and the performance of their stud receiver made that a lot scarier than it ought to have been – the way in which we won the other two was a clear demonstration that things have changed.  Against UConn, we took their best shot, rallied, and came back to take charge of the game.  Against Ole Miss, once we got rolling, we never took our foot off the gas and very nearly delivered a beatdown for the ages; at the very least, we may add Houston Nutt to the collection of “coaches who lost their job because of Vanderbilt.”
What else?  We certainly miss Warren Norman, but Zac Stacy and Jerrod Seymour are certainly doing their best to take up the slack.  Next year, with Norman back and Brian Kimbrow in the fold…the possible speed we could deploy next year would be unprecedented in our history.  Quarterbacking…it looks like most of Dores Nation has settled on Rodgers, and I don’t doubt he will probably see the bulk of snaps Saturday.  Regardless of how you feel about Larry Smith, his nagging injury problems alone will probably make him the second option going forward.  I suspect that the arrival of Austyn Carta-Samuels (from my wife’s arch-rival high school, no less) will complicate matters, as will the presence of redshirt freshman/recruiting coordinator Josh Grady.
Defense…what can you say?  Fifteen interceptions.  The legacy of Corey Chavous and DJ Moore is safe in the hands of Heyward and Wilson, and Heyward’s change-up power on offense has bailed us out of more than one sticky situation this year.  Chris Marve is exactly what we expected, Tim Fugger is a bad mo–oh I can’t even.  Anyway, Tim is a BAD BAD MAN behind the line of scrimmage.  Guys are stepping up and doing work.

The thing that really stands out to me, though – no sacks against Alabama.  I would have bet my house, my automobile, my sister, the complete contents of my liquor cabinet and my iPhone that we would never hold Alabama’s defense without a sack.  Hell, only one against Georgia.  Is it possible that Herb Hand is paying dividends at last?  The offense certainly seemed to have the measure of Georgia, barring that first disastrous triple-coverage end-zone pick.
So what’s next?
I think, again, most folks were and are predicting 3-3.  Army at home: winner.  Kentucky at home: winner.  Wake Forest, on the road or at home or in the parking lot of the Green Hills Kroger: winner.
That leaves the road games. Of what’s left, I dread Arkansas the most.  Florida and Tennessee both have quarterback injury issues, and while we won’t be favored in either matchup, they suddenly look eminently steal-able, especially in a Neyland Stadium where fans may well have tuned out and checked out by mid-November.  At last check, Tennessee is getting even more points from Alabama in Tuscaloosa than we did.
So, is 6-6 a successful first year?  I don’t know how anyone could think otherwise, especially coupled with the recruiting coups and the changed attitude and energy around the program.  There are things left to handle, of course.  Getting a packed student section from open gates to final gun is something that desperately needs to happen.  An indoor practice facility is something else we really shouldn’t be doing without in the new era.  The big-time recruits have to be kept in the fold all the way to National Signing Day.
But for right now, the dream is alive and the future is bright.  Anchor down?  ANCHOR DOWN.

I don’t know how it went down at the end of the game. Largely because I was busy drinking half a dozen cocktails in a speakeasy in San Francisco for most of the game, and they don’t exactly appreciate people hunched in a corner hitting reload on Sportacular over and over. But apparently, somebody had the ass at the end of the Vandy-Georgia game, and words were exchanged, and the shit just about jumped off.

Which. Is. AWESOME.

Look, I’m not saying we need to remake ourselves into the classic era Oakland Raiders, or the 80s Miami Hurricanes, or any Lane Kiffin team. But for far too long, we have been a doormat. More to the point, we’ve lived like a doormat. Terrible body language, shoulders slumped, no fire – remember 2007? Georgia barely escaped with their nuts against a sub-.500 Vandy team and felt sufficiently enthusiastic to dance en masse on the midfield logo, such that Mark Richt felt compelled to apologize after – and we basically sat there and let them do it.

And now, we actually have Georgia fans invading the board to rage about alleged cut blocks and dirty play and blah blah blah, as if this was Auburn or something. Meanwhile, who’s gotten the call back message from the SEC? Yup – Georgia’s defensive coordinator.

And you know why they’re mad? Because they didn’t cover. Because we had two plays at the end that could have won it. Because this team has more players from Georgia than any other state, and because Coach Franklin has been shuttling between high school games in Georgia via helicopter, and getting commitments.

The reason Georgia is mad is because the Bulldogs and Commodores have momentum in opposite directions, and the second-tier teams are going to be the first to feel the difference.