Are my eyes really blue?

I love Barry Bonds. Not as a person, or as a player, but for what he did in the end.

Baseball looked the other way on steroids for more than a decade. Then everyone woke up and realized what had happened, and through the hangover realized that baseball had completely lost its way. And they decided that Barry Bonds was the symbol of everything that was wrong. Old white sportswriters bawled like somebody’d shut down the buffet. Bud Selig suddenly decided he had better things to do than honor the impending accomplishment. Everyone wanted Barry Bonds to pay for the sins of baseball. And Barry refused to play along with it.

Everyone went apeshit for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998. Bonds took that record in 2001. Then, in 2007, he took the most hallowed record in baseball away from Hank Aaron. Every one of the aforementioned sports fossils wanted to apply an asterisk to the records – well, the asterisk is there, all right, and it’s on an entire decade of the sport. It’s on Bud Selig, it’s on the players union, it’s on the owners who looked the other way because the balls were flying out of the yard and the cash registers were ringing. Barry Bonds is God’s judgement on baseball – you think this guy’s an asshole, and you want to pin it all on him? He’s going to take your crown jewels and quite literally smash them with a ball bat.

To borrow a line from Battlestar Galactica, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done. Baseball got exactly what it deserved. Nobody likes the Angel of Death, but the judgement has to come from somewhere. And that’s why I like #25 – because he was given the role of Angel of Death, and he didn’t shirk from it. He didn’t apologize for it, he didn’t beg forgiveness, he didn’t knuckle under and accept the scorn and abuse from a thousand other guilty consciences. He went out, punched the clock, told the world to go fuck itself, and swung the bat. And I can’t help but respect that.

We live in a world of trolls. Message boards, AM radio, Westboro Baptist – you name it, the trolls are everywhere. At some point, a certain segment of people decided that it would be fun to go around looking to cause trouble. And it has become impossible to deal with them – you seem to have a choice between ignoring them and letting them go unchallenged, or engaging with them…which never seems to end well.

The problem becomes what I call the “smoking-on-the-platform effect” – it’s against the rules to smoke on the train platform, but somebody lights up anyway, and as soon as you call them on it, you are equally the asshole. I don’t know how this happened, but could make a couple of guesses – mostly stemming from white people who learned exactly the wrong lesson from civil disobedience and from a culture that privileges both sides equally no matter how far out on the seesaw one may be relative to the other.

The point is, the guy blows his smoke all over the platform, and you can tell him off or point out the rules, but he will continue to blow his smoke – usually with his middle finger up, which is generally the intent anyway – until he runs out of cigarettes or until he is forcibly stopped from smoking. Which makes people quail a bit – do you really want to call the police because a guy’s smoking? Now, what if there are no police and it’s on you to make it stand up? Or rather, what if despite the signs there’s actually no black-letter law that says you can’t smoke?

Take a turn through your typical metropolitan newspaper’s comment section and you’ll figure out what I’m talking about pretty quick. Hell, there’s a Greasemonkey extension for Firefox just to block all comments at al.com, which is proverbial for the craptastic quality of its conversation. The only thing that ever seems to have made a dent in all the nonsense is Slashdot’s famous system of community moderation and meta-moderation, where reading at +3 and up will filter most of the horseshit.

But it all boils down to the same thing. Turn it off. Walk away. Let it go. Block it out. The trick is, can you do that? And more importantly, what happens while you’re looking the other way? Long story short: what are you prepared to do?

I’m not worried about Mitt Romney in 2012. You know why? Because he’s not going to be the GOP nominee. Why not? Follow the bouncing ball.

1) It is impossible to win the GOP nomination without the South.

2) The South is populated heavily by Southern Baptists.

3) It is the official position of the Southern Baptists that Mormons “don’t really know the God of the Bible.” Not to put to fine a point on it, the Mormons are considered a cult.

4) People who believe that an American-born Christian is actually secretly a foreign-born Muslim are statistically likely to believe that a self-professed Mormon is a follower of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

5) See 3, above.

6) Therefore, viz. the South: Mormons = cult, Mitt = Mormon, Mitt = self-professed cult follower and unfit for higher office. QED.

Don’t believe me? Why else would the GOP nominee for governor of Alabama turn down a Romney endorsement?

October 1, 2004 was cool and overcast. The executive decision was taken that we should go down to main campus for breakfast and then take it easy the rest of the day. We all knew what was coming – the huge rush of shows and orders that was already being referred to as Black October, something we had hoped to avoid until the lab was up and running and we had everything sorted out. As it was, we were only somewhat operational, but it was good enough that we truly thought we’d earned a day to slow-roll things.

There were even leaves turning on some of the trees. It really felt autumnal, and after the chaos of summer and moving halfway across the country, it felt like I was starting to get back into a groove, to get some of my powers back – almost two months at the new job and I was finally finding my comfort zone. And as I wandered back to see some interesting things I can’t discuss to this day, I thought, “this is going to be good.”

That’s when everything went black.

Power outage. Big one. Entire town. We rushed back to the lab to find no power there either. With a little scuffling, we got a generator and emergency power together sufficient to image some machines, but external communications were out, which meant no FedEx machine. Which meant that the tremendous order would have to be sent not with the easy stick-on labels that would have taken five minutes to produce, but with handwritten airbills. Which was a fiasco.

In the end, we wound up commandeering a friend’s Jeep and loading it down with cases strapped on all sides like some sort of third-world bus. Our manager was trying to bribe the guys at the airport to hold the plane five minutes so we could get away okay. Meanwhile, the other contractor helped me park the forklift, and we sat on the curb and smoked and watched the sun set, wondering if our badges would work the next day.

They did. But over the next six weeks plus, our manager would be summarily dismissed and our director would run the show personally, with the daily 8 AM meeting to hand out paper lists of orders already prioritized, and “get as far down the list as you can.” I spent plenty of days holed up at a bench, with our primitive imaging system that only kinda sorta scaled, barricaded behind a seven-foot wall of boxes and shipping cases, trying to piece together a dozen laptops for shipping using whatever scraps of foam and accessories I could assemble. In retrospect, it’s flabbergasting we weren’t all lined up and shot.

But it was during that time that I discovered Virgin Radio, and set to streaming with Martin Collins and his “Mellow Madness” or Suggs doing Party Classics on Friday, with an endless array of commercials for things I’d never heard of. It was very nearly the same sort of five-months-on whiplash I’d “enjoyed” in 1997 – here I am, new town, new job, new life that I would never have expected as the old one wound down. Which was actually pretty impressive – for the second time in a decade, I had fallen ass-backward into a new home and a new job far from the old one, this time in the company of a six foot blonde.

The first time that happened, I realized I was an incredibly lucky person. Nothing since has given me any reason to deviate from this diagnosis.

* Bama may have something after all, if they can keep pressing people into mistakes.

* Vandy managed not to lose. Of course it was a bye week.

* The Redskins are in dreadful condition, cannot be considered a favorite in any game they have left this season, and will require major overhaul once the new CBA is hammered out (again, don’t count on NFL football in 2011 as a sure thing by any stretch).

* Cal played not to lose, hung on for 57 minutes, and then gave up one big play that broke their back. I don’t think the Bears could drop below 4 wins, and it’s always possible they will manage to rise to the occasion against UCLA or Washington or in the Big Game, but I wouldn’t want to bet on a winning season at this point. Riley is as good as he’s ever going to be as a quarterback, which is “not very”, and you can’t run Shane Vereen to death the entire season – which means the defense will get no rest.

I get the feeling this is God’s way of telling me to stop caring about football so much.

You could read these guys.

Or you could read this guy and get the same thing a year sooner.

The older I get…

* Respect to Duke for not moving the game to Charlotte and selling an extra 30,000 seats, of which 29,997 would have probably gone to Alabama fans. However, the real problem might have been scheduling the game in the first place. No idea why some of these games happen.

* Speaking of – apparently the Nevada tilt was considered Cal’s “A” non-conference game this year. I don’t know whether this is begging the question or just after-the-fact rationalization, but it makes no sense to me that you’d schedule your non-con games C-B-A, leaving all summer for Davis but needing a short week for a road game at altitude against an exotic offense with a propensity for breakaway scoring. For the first time, we have a loss that may be less on Tedford and more on Sandy Barber’s scheduling – something that’s already giving pause for thought with the month gap between home games.

* I think before the season, people would have been thrilled with a 30-27 OT loss to Houston and a win over Dallas to start the season. Proof, if any were needed, that the euphoria of beating Dallas is a worse drug than black tar heroin. Also, Gary Kubiak does need to eat a bag of dicks for that utterly hack move with the timeout before the field goal, but do you know who was the first to bring that particular move to the NFL? That’s right, noted douchebag Mike Shanahan – now the coach of the Redskins. Karma’s a motherfucker, and we could do without it, especially now that the universe has ten years of illegal cut blocks to reckon with.

* Four out of six. Math it up. Vandy has beaten LOL Miss (ht EDSBS) four years out of the past six, including both of the last two games in Oxford. There’s a reason a win over the Rebels has become a critical component of Big Six, and matters are probably made worse this year with the likely loss IN Connecticut (who the hell is scheduling these things)? and the resulting need for two extra conference wins to make six (although you have to think Tennessee could be had, and we do have a way of tripping up South Carolina whenever they get good). I don’t know how good the Furd is, but looking at Wake Forest down 41-7 at the half I’m more sanguine about our prospects for derailing the Demon Deacons to end the year…

If you didn’t care for the Killers’ second album, you may not be the target audience for the first solo effort from Brandon Flowers, the lead singer of the aforementioned band. But you should give it a listen anyway. The countrified slide guitar and John Cougar-esque references differentiate it from what you would get from the main band, and – to borrow from an iTunes review – Brandon’s obvious mission is to make himself the Bruce Springsteen of Clark County, Nevada. And the opening track, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” is something you could totally hear being sung in the voice of the Boss.

Still the best new act of the last 10 years.

It’s only been 47 years.

In the course of monkeying around with a netbook and then an iPad, and with some mild Kindle experimentation going on with other folks’ hardware, I’ve come to think a little more about what I carry with me. Obviously, if you have to carry a bag, you may as well put some of your S in it beyond just the laptop (and if you DO have to carry a bag, unless you are traveling you may as well have the laptop rather than a lesser device). But even before I went back to the stage of carrying a 15″ MacBook Pro back and forth to work every day in a Timbuk2 backpack (and then scaling down to a lighter one-strap laptop sleeve with a couple of pockets), I was already reducing what I go around with. To wit:

SMOKING UTENSILS. Let’s face it: when I lived in DC, I was a smoker. Since leaving Cupertino, I’m not. Badabing. During that ten-year window, I had to go around with a pipe, a Zippo lighter, a tobacco pouch, and some means of scraping and cleaning said pipe. That is a hell of a lot of gear, even if you don’t add a cigar punch to the mix, and I usually did.

POCKET TOOL. I’ve carried a pocketknife of some sort almost continuously since starting high school, because I’m a guy from Alabama and that is the done thing. By the time I was a year or so into DC, I had ramped up to one Leatherman or another to weigh down my pockets. When I started in California, I worked somewhere that had all the tools I needed in ready reach, and the state of things evolved to the point where I found I almost never needed to carry a Leatherman or Swiss Army knife or the like. By the end of my time in Cupertino, I was down to a simple Buck knife with a hookbill blade for opening boxes and a bottle opener on the back – and with my Vandy ring, even the bottle opener is superfluous. Now, the work Swiss Army Cybertool is in my laptop bag, because if I’m not somewhere with a computer I probably don’t need it.

PAGER/BLACKBERRY. I was forced to keep toting the pager until the end of my time in DC, so most days I was going out with a pager, a cell phone, and some sort of music player (Walkman, then Rio, then another Rio, then the first iPod I owned). Not until a couple of weeks into the iPhone era did I finally feel the need to divest myself of the separate iPod. I also haven’t had a separate work phone, except for a couple of years in Cupertino, and even then I divested myself of my personal phone shortly thereafter. Now, with the iPhone doing for everything, a whole category of utility-belt crap has gone away.

CAR KEY. I kept it separate from my other keys almost from the time I arrived in DC and parked the car, and now it usually sits on the nightstand.

So what am I down to for everyday carry? It’s gotten about as light and simple as I can make it. What has it got in its pocketses, precious?

KEYS. Duh. House and a couple others, including the work lockup.

CLIP. And when I say clip, I mean an extra-small binder clip holding my folding money to a thin sliver of driver’s license, insurance card, credit card, debit card and work ID (with transit pass stickers). That’s pretty much all I ever need on a routine basis and it’s smaller than any wallet.

iPHONE (w/earbuds obvs). This goes in a pocket all by itself. Replaces phone, pager, iPod, books, magazines, laptop*, VCR, record shop, James Spann**, and those whiteboards we all had on the dorm room door in 1990.

HANDKERCHIEF. Hey, I’m from Alabama and I’m allergic to air, what do you expect? (Guys: the move is to have two. One in your pocket for the nose, and one in your inside jacket pocket in case a young lady needs to burst into tears or blot her lipstick or something. Trust your Unca Donkey. Also, quit smoking machine-rolled cigars from the drugstore.)

PEN. Has gone in the right hip pocket since 7th grade. The current model is almost always some sort of Fisher Space Pen, because I don’t write with it very often and the important thing is that it make a mark the first time wherever (and on whatever) I happen to be writing.

NOTEBOOK. Because you can’t jot down reminders in an iPhone in 5 seconds or less. The little paperback Rhodia is the thinnest thing I can easily use and doesn’t seem to have covers as fragile as the Moleskine Cahiers I use for travel abroad.

WALLET (optional). This is a Timbuk2 card wallet which holds all the stuff you don’t actually need daily but might be handy to have: donor card for the Blood Center, pass to the California Academy of Sciences, my Clipper card in case I need to take mass transit in the Bay Area other than Caltrain or VTA, five or six business cards, a five-pound note from the Bank of Scotland (hey, you never know), all my CERT identifier/certification cards (basically everything twice, once for work and once for home), and the Costco membership card in case I suddenly need five gallons of mustard and a 36-pack of Mexican Coke. The best part is that I don’t even necessarily have to have this, so if I have to go somewhere in a tux or what have you, I can leave it behind without a problem. And it’s flat enough that it’s not really a problem for everyday carry.

That’s it. Obviously this doesn’t cover worn things like sunglasses or watch or work badge, but that’s what I’m down to after twenty-five years of carrying things in my pockets.

Next trick? Using the greatly reduced space in the laptop sleeve to force a cutdown of what I carry back and forth daily…

* The iPhone isn’t truly a laptop replacement, but I would argue that it’s a very servicable netbook replacement.

** When I was a kid it was Channel 6, now it’s Channel 33/40, but the process is the same: if it’s tornado season and the weather is bad, turn on the TV and wait for James Spann. If he’s standing in front of the weather radar in a coat and tie, you’re fine; you can ignore all the watches and warnings and stuff, nothing to see here. If he has the coat off and the sleeves rolled up, it’s gonna be a long night and you need to take your ass to the storm cellar.