Are my eyes really blue?

So it appears that there was an armed citizen at the site of the Saturday shootings. He heard the shots, pulled out the gun, flipped off the safety, ran toward the commotion, and…almost shot the guy who had taken away the gun from the assailant.

Whoops.

Arizona is damn near the most gun-friendly state in the country, as you’d expect from the state that gave us Barry Goldwater and Joe Arpaio. You don’t need a permit for concealed carry and you can buy 30-round magazines for your Glock – two conditions not possible in California, for instance – so in theory, a place like Arizona is where the gunhugger theory about armed society and politeness would take its fullest effect. The flaw in this thinking is that it requires a person to make considered assumptions about the likelihood of armed response and the notion that anyone around him might be packing heat – and quite frankly, if everyone is capable of logic and reason, the need for everyone to be armed drops precipitously.

The problem is this: it’s not that we don’t regulate guns, it’s that we don’t regulate who has guns. In Switzerland, there are assault rifles all over the place, you’ll see a guy walking through the supermarket with a SIG 550 over his shoulder – but it’s because every man jack in the country has to do his military service and then keep the rifle at home thereafter, where two sealed boxes of ammunition wait against the day he’s called to defend the country. Meanwhile, for an administrative fee of 30 francs, an officer can retain his 9mm pistol after leaving active duty. But in both cases, you’re talking about a situation where the person has been trained, practices routinely, and is in every way qualified to use the weapon – and presumably knows when to.

Mr. Almost-Fucked-Up in Tucson has no military or law-enforcement background at all, by his own admission. He merely “grew up around guns.” Well, so did I. Hell, quite a few purchases have been financed through the gradual unloading of my late father’s personal arsenal. (Everything from tires to sportcoats, and I still have a little walking-around money unaccounted for.) In a lot of cases, the things hadn’t even been shot (the Colt Government .380 pistol, which I’m sure was bought in the mid-90s when his arthritis wouldn’t allow for a more powerful cartridge, was said last year by a dealer never to have been fired). The point is: yer boy grew up around firearms, and I learned things, like – all guns are always loaded, never put your finger on the trigger unless you’re pulling it, never point at anything you don’t want destroyed, and never shoot at anything if you don’t know exactly what’s behind it. And especially – if you have a gun, and you hear shots being fired, that gun is not a license to run toward the shots. They have people for that, and they’re called cops. If you’re packing, it’s for those times when somebody is pointing a weapon AT you, at which point your objective is to get away from them; the gun is there to impede them in their pursuit.

The problem in this country isn’t the guns. It isn’t even the people who have the guns. It’s the people who go armed all the time, who want to go armed all the time, because they want to need to go armed all the time.

Fifty years ago, before they went off the rails, the National Rifle Association was pretty much what the name implies: an organization devoted to marksmanship, shooting sports, conservation (!), and other things of interest to responsible gun owners. But when random civilian people are demanding 30-round clips, or the ability to walk through Starbucks with pistol on hip, or insisting on carrying rifles to political demonstrations, it’s pretty clear that the word responsible has taken a hike.

* Auburn wins. Perfect ending to the worst football season in recent memory – they are officially the least bad team in college football for 2010, at least until the NCAA strips them of the title in 2013. On the bright side, not one other SEC fan was willing to rally behind them for the sake of conference solidarity – which hopefully brings an end to the “S-E-C!” meme. All that gushy “we should all support our conference’s teams in the bowls” nonsense is for hippie granola conferences. KIDDING HONEY.**

* Maybe now Oregon will quit trying to kid themselves. They got pantsed in Strawberry Canyon last November, and tried to make it go away by plugging their ears and screaming “FAKE INJURY FAKE INJURY” at the top of their lungs. Well how about this: if one guy taking one dive is enough to drag your offense down to 30 points less than its per-game average, your offense sucks monkey bricks. Auburn went to school on what Cal did, and as a result, Oregon scored…wait for it…30 points less than their per-game average.

* I will say this for the sake of conference solidarity: if you don’t have a two-back power game to use down at the goal line when you need points, don’t schedule an SEC team. That usually ends badly, especially if your back seven or eight can just spread wide and stay in lanes without having to worry about middle run support.

* So Verizon’s getting the iPhone 4. CDMA, not LTE, which means – as you are about to hear shouted from the rooftops – you can’t do voice and data at the same time. Yes, you will get Verizon’s super network, and yes, you can wi-fi your data connection out to 5 other machines, but the first time a call comes in? It all drops. I didn’t think Verizon would be willing to be exposed like that, but then, I didn’t think Apple would give them apps on the front page either. So we’ll see. I fully expect this to end in tears.

* Well, it looks like the Verizon apps are downloadable, rather than installed. Not surprising. I will be really curious how this all looks in eight to twelve weeks.

* I heard DJ Earworm’s annual mashup of the top 25 songs of the year, which one person described as “a brave attempt to make a gourmet meal out of 25 shit sandwiches.” I definitely buy into the notion that this year’s music is all about the mindless techno version of Masque of the Red Death. I also think that if “California Gurls” was supposed to be the response to “Empire State of Mind” then NYC clowned California and we should have Katy Perry hanged as an inadequate representative. But then I hear Russell Brand dimed her out on Twitter with no makeup, which sounds like punishment enough…

* I need to lay in some decaf coffee. I know, blasphemy, but sometimes you need the civilizing influence of coffee at 9 PM. I don’t have what I had.

* Speaking of, the high point of bowl season was the regular liveblog on EDSBS. And even though it’s hard not to feel like the Old Dude In The Club sometimes, it was still a hell of a lot of fun and made the best of what was a substandard BCS season. Again, it may be the finest sports blog on Earth; if you’re not reading it for all your college football needs, you’re missing out.

* So glad to have Craig Ferguson back on the DVR, even if he’s not doing the epic 20-minute monologues of days gone by, which honestly might have been the most epic thing on TV ever. This very bright guy, with a hell of a story and a hell of a lot of baggage, just baring his soul nightly at 12:30 on CBS? It was great, and HD isn’t quite enough to make up the difference.

* Shutdown time. Must remember to plug in the backup phone, even though I don’t think I’m going anywhere. Laptop in bag, Kindle to wireless-off (probably magazines tonight, to be honest), pen in pocket and pad within reach, scrambled eggs for dinner and Angostura soda for dessert…

** totally not kidding.***

***totally kidding. As far as you know.****

****insert Eddie Izzard nod/shake sequence here until it stops being funny, then continue 5 minutes

Well, the SEC was not up to scratch this year. Consider that the leader of the SEC East would have finished roughly fifth in the West, and you see how imbalanced the league was. Not one team in twelve was able to field an offense AND a defense that were both up to SEC competition standard. In a way, Auburn is a throwback to eighty or ninety years ago – vagabond tailback shows up for one year and runs the single-wing to a championship. In a normal SEC, a team built around one player – running, in essence, a high school offense, “just put the best athlete under center and let him handle the ball every down, and hope for the best” – would finish 8-4 at best. (And considering the near escapes against South Carolina and Alabama – not to mention the complete lack of credible defense – you have to think that given ten chances to repeat, Auburn couldn’t deliver an undefeated season again.)

But.

Oregon is the closest thing to an NFL team out there – the bottomless money from Phil Knight has put them on a different level from anyone in sports. Their defense is slightly better, but their high-speed no-huddle spread option was very nearly shut down by a 5-7 Cal defense. (And spare me the caterwauling about “faking injuries” – if one guy taking one flop is enough to shut down your offense, your offense sucks.)

There shouldn’t be a championship this year. The SEC was the worst it’s been in a decade or more, and the Pac-10 was if anything worse. The only title the winner tonight deserves is “least godawful team of 2010 and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

Four years ago, on the eve of Florida’s first national title under Urban Meyer, the proprietor of Every Day Should Be Saturday – the finest of all college football blogs – posted an essay called “The Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione”. It may be the finest thing ever written about the last day of college football, on the eve of the national championship, and stands for me as proof that the blogosphere is every bit the equal of traditional media in the coverage of college football.

Go. Read. You can thank me later.

We all know the story. I’ve beaten it to death on here more times than I can count. For persons of a certain age and class, your college friends are a nontrivial part of your life – the ones who stand up with you at weddings, send cards at Christmas, blah blah. Some you may be more involved with than others – some of my closest friends are still in a tight loop with them twenty or twenty-five years on – but they exist.

By my best reckoning, I am in contact with exactly ONE person from that seven-year stretch at my undergrad school and Vanderbilt – and it’s because said Vanderbilt person was also at my high school back in the day. (She’s a foreign service officer in the frackin’ UKRAINE now, but that’s neither here nor there.) So…what exactly am I doing? If I still lived in the ancestral lands, would I still want to be involved with the local alumni organization? Especially given what sort of people from my school are likely to be in Birmingham or Atlanta or Nashville instead of San Francisco? I’m not going to be going to any reunion events, because, well, I wasn’t an undergrad and the grad students are unlikely to do one.

(What provoked all this? I Kindled a book on the Senate by Dr. Frances Lee. I can’t even remember her last name now, but she married Emery Lee, another guy from our department – they were the anchor couple of the Family back in the day, and she is now a name to be reckoned with in matters Senatorial – she will be up there with Bruce Oppenheimer and Barbara Sinclair before you know it if she’s not already. And looking through the early pages, I saw names of faculty and students I hadn’t thought about in years, and it warms my heart to see these guys as decorated political scientists – even if the last time I saw them was on New Years’ Day 1998 about 1 AM in Alexandria when we just happened to be on the same Metro train.)

So we have long established that I have disavowed my undergraduate institution, and have distanced myself from the collegiate team of my youth. There is, as you all know, a serious impediment to affiliating myself with my current employer. So my current options are to either take a bite off the wife’s team (which has heretofore been a much better solution for football) or continue to claim Vanderbilt. But what am I claiming? What’s the connection?

I was going over my list of things I have enjoyed over the last four years, something I started back when I first began grappling with the “who am I now” question, and because I’m me, I was trying to puzzle out categories and metrics and quantify it, and ultimately it boiled down to two things: friends (self-explanatory) and atmosphere. Seriously, that’s what I came down to. And then it all clicked.

What do I miss from Vanderbilt days? Sitting on the deck at SATCO with a bucket of Rocks to wash down the fajitas. Walking by the library at dawn or up Peabody Esplanade at dusk. The Overcup Oak at night, with a fire in the fireplace. Memorial Gym, anytime. The feel of driving up US 100 or 70 with a clear sky full of stars and 20 degrees outside and Sacramento-Cavs coming in clear on WWWE out of Cleveland. The novelty of new channels on the TV and new local commercials. And what is it about throwing in with Cal that I enjoy? Gameday, of course, the roar of the band on Sproul Plaza and the setting sun lighting up Tightwad Hill in a golden glow and the chill of a Big Game tailgate morning up by Sather Tower and Zachary’s after the game.

I had contradictory things all over the list – 5-space, going out with friends, having people over, cocooning at home with the wife, you name it – but so many things just came down to atmosphere. Stretched out on the sofa in a nice freshly clean house with a little Gaucho on the Bose. Driving up Highway 1 under a gray sky with the Redskins on the radio. Walking down the street in the Outer Sunset, a block from the Pacific Ocean, on the way to stepping into the Riptide to sit in front of the fire with a wee dram. A quiet seat at O’Flaherty’s or Trials or O’Neills on a sparsely populated Sunday evening, or walking through the farmer’s market on a Sunday morning, or a beer at Tied House with the NFL playoffs on one screen and hockey on another. Or the phenomenon of “Vanderbilt camping” at the Ritz-Carlton, or actual camping in Portola with the kind of silence you only get by going deep into the woods. Or anything in London, or Switzerland, or Yosemite, or New Orleans…

I can’t nail it down to one thing in particular, I can’t describe it or reliably recreate it, but I know it when I experience it (and I certainly remember after the fact) – the setting makes a big difference in my story. And this may be a healthy thing – after all, living in the moment probably involves a good deal of appreciating the moment and the circumstances. Who knows, maybe I actually developed some in those four years.

A lot of people are talking a bunch of nonsense about not jumping to conclusions and avoiding incendiary rhetoric and such.

PLEASE. After a year of jabbering about “reloading” and “Second Amendment solutions” and lists of names with crosshairs by them, we need to show some restraint so a bunch of teabaggers don’t get their precious fee-fees hurt? How about this: don’t lie down with pigs if you don’t want people to accuse you of smelling like shit.

The guilty flee where no man pursues.

Yes, you still have to execute when you’re put in a situation, but there is absolutely no way that an 11-5 team should have ever been made to go on the road 2000 miles away to play at the home of a 7-9 team in a playoff game. The fact that the NFL still privileges winning the division when there are so few division games (only 6 out of 16 – less than 40% of the schedule) is ridiculous in the extreme, and if there are no changes to the playoff system before next year, it will prove once and for all what a garbage organization the NFL is – assuming, that is, they don’t lock out the players and prove it anyway.

That, plus – where to start? Vandy pisses away a 14-point lead and loses to South Carolina? Stanford wins the Orange Bowl? Auburn a field-goal favorite to win a national championship? There is no God. Not in sports, anyway.

All right. Puke and rally. There’s still dinner out on the town yet to come…

The spam situation with Moveable Type is out of control. Legit comments are being auto-flagged as spam, while spam is getting through the tightest filter settings at a rate of ~1000 per week. So if you do place a comment, it might not hurt to ping me…I’m considering trying to implement registration but I don’t know if that’s possible in this configuration; I’m also considering whitelisting email addresses if the system will allow it.

Thanks. We now return to your regularly scheduled snark and whining…

So Andrew Luck, faced with the loss of most of his bodyguards (3 O-linemen and a fullback going away) and with the money of the #1 overall pick on the table, decides to stick around and play at least one more year.

And then 24 hours, his coach flies the coop to go to the NFL.

What’s Google’s core business? Aside from advertising, of course. Well duh: search. Search is at the root of what Google does; it’s the reason they can even sell you advertising in the first place, because it’s keyed to what you search for.

Earlier in the week, on Shutdown Night, we had a friend over who lives in DC and is searching for a new place to live, owing to a massive soap opera with her landlords (who are splitting up) – but her situation is complicated by the fact she has a dog. No problem – my first instinct is to jump on Facebook, make sure all my old DC people are on the post, and pitch her situation and requirements to see if they have any insight on pet-friendly accommodations in proximity to either where she works or a Metro line that will get her there. Bibbity bobbity boo.

Warren Ellis had a 12-issue comic miniseries called Global Frequency, which John Rogers (of Leverage fame) turned into the pilot for a series. It didn’t get made, but the pilot leaked on BitTorrent and became a cult hit. The premise is that there is an organization known only as the Global Frequency that exists outside of normal government and multinational channels, largely focused on cleaning up the messes left behind by the Cold War and other clandestine nonsense (and funded on the sly by the countries that created those problems). The organization consists of its mysterious leader, her mysterious assistant who runs the switchboard and the screens…and a thousand people who have The Phone, which will occasionally ring, and you will be asked to bring your particular talent to bear on the problem. Linguistics, physics, sharpshooter, free-runner, guy who built his own homemade rocket – if you are the best there is at what you do, at some point Miranda Zero shows up on your doorstep and hands you The Phone.

The thing is, we all have that. Doctors, video game designers, amateur pilots, psychologists, law enforcement, insiders at Fortune 100 tech companies, knitters, journalists, artists, lawyers, Foreign Service officers, cello players, National Geographic photographers, librarians – all of those and more are just in the first hundred or so people I see on my Facebook list. Now maybe I’ve lived most of my last fifteen years on the Internet and benefit from having built out an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances to start with, but if somebody says “dog-friendly lodging in DC,” my first thought isn’t to type into Google, it’s to punch out a post – “hey DMV, you are on the Global Frequency” – and see who replies and what they suggest or report.

Google used to be much better at this. PageRank and its algorithms did what Yahoo hadn’t been able to keep up with by hand and Alta Vista simply wasn’t capable of handling: cut through the crap and get to what you want. But as one writer after another is reporting, the eternal quest for SEO and ad revenue is leading to an explosion of redundant content, scrape-off sites, and out-and-out spam between you and what you want to know. And if you can post on Facebook, or fire off a tweet and get a response, how much faster and more reliable is that than wading through ten pages of Google links trying to see which of them might have valid information and which are LITERALLY the same forum content recapitulated three times over with different ads NASCARd around them?

If Facebook – or Diaspora, or Twitter, or some other social networking entity I can’t even imagine yet – can do a good job of streamlining the path between the knowledge our friends (and theirs) possess and what we want to know, it would trump any search engine you can think of. If somebody figures out how to make this work reliably – and then monetize it – look out.