Are my eyes really blue?

So BYU reacts to its Pac-10 snub by taking its ball and leaving the MWC to go…independent. Well, not entirely. They’re back to the old WAC for everything but football, but in football, they’re going to try to go it alone. This is actually not a bad move for them, as they can play a bunch of WAC-level teams, add in a few mildly improved competitors, and have a Boise State-type situation almost every year where they can keep themselves in the BCS picture with a minimum of effort.

I can’t think Boise is thrilled with how things worked out – the two biggest-ticket teams in the MWC have flown the coop, leaving them in a conference that’s not that much better than what they left. However, the MWC tonight has backfilled their empties with Fresno State and Nevada, two programs that while hardly national powers are still teams you don’t want to find on your Homecoming docket. Add them to a conference with Boise State and TCU, plus the don’t-look-past-them of Air Force and the not-to-be-taken-lightly of Colorado State and San Diego State – hell’s bells, the new-look Mountain West is at least as legit as the Big East or ACC, and far more so than the forthcoming Texas Ten, when it comes time to hand out BCS berths.

This is a good move. It sends BYU out to play in the traffic, which is fine by me, and reorganizes what’s left of the MWC and WAC into one pretty damn capable football conference. The flip side is that the WAC no longer has enough teams to exist as a football league – they have six, and the rules say you need eight. I fully expect a daylight raid on Conference USA any minute now, which will in turn raid the Sun Belt, which will in turn try to make some sort of arrangement (does Georgia State need a conference affiliation?) and POP goes the weasel. The part of the weasel, as always, will be played by the BCS.

Created by Oatmeal

I could pass. I’m white, male, straight, of more or less average appearance (and with something approaching a mutant power of perception filtering to disappear in a crowd). If I just kept my mouth shut and went right along, there would be nothing at all to distinguish me from the vast army of middle-class hicks that populate the Hookworm Belt one step up from the trailer park. Hell, I did pass. I spent most of eighth grade slouching and slurring and using words like “hisself” that I knew goddamn well weren’t within a thousand miles of correct English. And I did it to try to get by. 1986 was the worst year of my life that didn’t involve death.

If I were willing to just switch off my brain, I could go along and get along just fine and nobody would be the wiser. I don’t have to be the kind of weirdo I was in elementary school, or the outcast I was in undergrad. I was a minority – not a patch on people with different skin color or sexuality, but definitely not normal – from the worst place in America not to be normal. But I could get by without a peep.

All I have to do is acquiesce.

When in fact, I want just the opposite. I want to rage out. I want my team to impose its views on the minority. I want Tennessee fans to be too terrified to set foot on the BART to Berkeley and I want people scared to put “Yes On 8” stickers on their car for fear of the eggs and rocks and I want listening to AM talk radio to be regarded as a deviance on par with kiddie porn. But that doesn’t happen, because we have to be tolerant of those who have different beliefs and we have to respect diversity even when it wants to round us up and put us in camps.

Just once, before I die, I’d love to see a time when bigotry, ignorance and just plain asshole stop being treated as valid points of view and start being regarded for what they are – deviant behavior. This is why I make a piss-poor liberal, and why I know the Alabama DNA is too tightly woven around my brainstem to ever be truly overcome. I don’t want to escape, I don’t want my freedom, I don’t want peace and quiet, I don’t want to just walk away – I want revenge.

Am I the only person who sees purple spots and has to go outside and walk around for 20 minutes when the thought occurs that your freedoms are subject to veto by retarded hicks and their amen corner on TV?

…is because his opponent is certifiably, clinically, batshit loonball crazy.

Otherwise, in every meaningful way, the only reason Harry Reid is not a total pussy is because to call him such would be to sully the good name of pussy.

If you want to know why the Democrats have struggled for two years, it’s because they have a worthless sack of jelly as the Senate Majority Leader. Hopefully someday he’ll be able to get his testicles out of the blind trust.

“Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore.”

Safari 5 has support for “extensions” – something Firefox has had forever and which Chrome jumped on right away. These are what we used to call “plug-ins” – bringing additional functionality to your browser. Unlike the old days, though, when you needed plugins for a slew of different media formats, these are mainly to add things like a GMail Inbox indicator or an ad blocker or an “Add To Amazon Wish List” 1-click button.

And then there’s “Shut Up”, which is a plugin that uses common bits of HTML to know where to find comments on a website – and remove them from view.

I’ve been keeping a blog of some sort for over eleven years now. It’s bopped around different places, using different formats and things, but for the first five or six years – barring a six-month experiment with Blogger as the back end – I didn’t have comments available. In fact, of the blogs I read, some of the most critical once don’t have comments at all.

It’s a tough thing, comments. Occasionally, if things break just right, you have something like Deadspin Up! All Night, which for a while was the closest thing to the old Zone I’ve seen since (it spawned at least two other blogs just from like-minded groups of commenters on this one last post per day). Or EDSBS, which has long since stopped being a Florida football blog and turned into some sort of collective performance art. And supposedly Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has quite a well-curated comment section that actually brings something to the table.

And then, at the other end, there’s…well, everything else. The comments at al.com are pretty much rock bottom, and YouTube is right there alongside, but for the most part, venturing into the comment section of any major news website is a complete waste of time and may make you want to stick a gun in your mouth. Especially if you ever taught high school English. Hell, middle school English. I probably wouldn’t have comments if I had my druthers, but I can’t be arsed to figure out how to turn them off. Besides, it’s not really an issue for most individual bloggers.

Because here’s the thing: I’m basically standing on a platform I built myself (with help from my brother-in-law) and I’ve put up a body of work which I like to think reflects my knowledge, experience, and ruminations over a period of – gosh, four years or so now. It’s not particularly sharp, it’s not particularly insightful, and it probably doesn’t add too too much to the world’s storehouse of wisdom – but it’s mine, and I pretty much stand by it.

Here’s the thing, though: the opportunity cost of a blog is exactly zero relative to a comment. You need a computer and Internet access anyway, and Blogger and WordPress and Tumblr and TypePad Micro and Vox and Livejournal and I don’t know what else – they’re all free at the point of use. Basically, when you post a public comment on a blog, you’re saying “I am entitled to the use of your platform and bullhorn for my own opinion.” And for a personal blog which pretty much nobody reads, that’s fine. However, on bigger blogs or sites, it deteriorates rapidly – because given Internet access and practical anonymity, the average individual turns into a 14-year-old boy, with all the intelligence, wisdom, sensitivity and grammar that implies. The caliber of graffiti on the back wall of my high school was an order of magnitude smarter than the kind of bullshit that accompanies most any online news story, and God help you if you venture into the darker corners of the Internet.

I say that to say this: I think that for the most part, website comments are part and parcel of an extremely unfortunate trend of public life in this country. We have reached a point in this Year of Our Lord 2010 when we give everyone an equal right to be heard, irrespective of maturity, qualification, or even sanity. In the real world, if you’re parked at a stop sign and a crazed homeless person starts to crawl into your window screaming about Majestic-12 and the alien menace, do you enter into a discourse with him and try to reason with him and show him the flaws in his logic?

No. Hell no. You stomp the gas and lay a patch right through the intersection and peel out of there. If necessary, you whack him in the face with your coffee mug to make him let go of the window.

The problem is, on the internet, there’s an army of deranged nutters, and they’re everywhere. If you want to enter into a serious discussion on CNN.com, or ESPN, or (fill in literally ANY newspaper’s website), well, God bless you, but you’re not going to get it. You’re going to sink into a steady swamp of trolls, flamers, and outright morons who are still relying on that free AOL disk they got on a copy of George magazine.

We’ve made serious public discourse impossible in this country, because we’ve allowed everyone to play. You don’t have to be reasonable, you don’t have to be logical, you don’t even have to exist in the same reality as those of us who have green grass and blue skies in our world (well, at least in November and December). And for those of us who want public life to be carried on at a slightly more erudite level than a shit fight at the monkey house, we’ve been reduced to two and a half choices. We can either not go to that part of town at all, or we can go there with the windows rolled up and blacked out, resolutely staring forward and ignoring the bumping and banging outside.

Or you can lean over and punch your hanger-on in the face. The downside of that is that once you engage in the shit fight, the monkey invariably gets shit all over you.

OK, I admit up front this may be the most offensive thing I’ve written – well, maybe ever, but here goes anyway. I regret nothing.

If you’re not from Lower Manhattan, or Arlington, or didn’t have a friend or a relative on one of those four planes – if you’re just some random from some square state somewhere – and you feel the need to start lecturing people down around Park Place about “anguish” and “catastrophic pain” and “self-deception” and “surrender”…

You need to shut the fuck up. Right. Fucking. Now.

This is a thing that happened. “9/11” is not Rudy Giuliani’s political mascot. It is glib shorthand for an actual event, with actual consequences. And the last thing on Earth that is necessary, or appropriate, or even tolerable, is to have somebody else lecturing those of us WHO ACTUALLY HAD TERRORISTS CRASH PLANES IN OUR CITY LIMITS about how we ought to feel, or react, or respond, or view the world.

I mean it. Step off. Zip it. KNOW YOUR ROLE, SHUT YOUR HOLE.

Opinions are like assholes – and I couldn’t be less interested in yours.

Steve Wozniak is 60 years old today. That’s probably not as bone-chilling as it should be.

If all he’d ever done was create Breakout, or the floppy disk controller for the Apple ][ , Woz would be remembered as a genius. But he also had a dab hand in the creation of the Macintosh as we know it, and his is the DNA in Apple that keep the Jobsian drive leavened with perspective and a sense of humor. Infinite Loop – hell, the world – is a better place for the efforts of Employee #1, and if he wants to spend his years now as the court jester of Silicon Valley? Nobody is more deserving – or suited.

Cheers, Woz. Hope next time you go drinking with Gray Powell you get more than a lousy T-shirt. ;]

…I said at one point that I couldn’t think of ANY superhero team movie that hadn’t gone down the chute. Obviously I whiffed on X-Men and its sequels. The first two were pretty good, especially in making the whole thing accessible to non-comic folks, but the 3rd was just egregious. Bryan Singer left to do Superman, leaving X-Men for Brett Ratner, which killed both franchises dead.

I guess what I was thinking was that there’s never been a film that combined a bunch of established characters – thinking of something like Justice League of America, which would have Superman AND Wonder Woman AND Batman, all characters that would carry their own movie normally. The lineup for Avengers seems a little more daunting since everyone will have had at least one movie of their own – and Robert Downey Jr. has almost pulled Iron Man to the level of a Spiderman or Hulk, where the character is at least beyond the “huh?” level with normal civilian non-genre types.

Looking back, if you consider Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008 to be the start of the unified Marvel film universe, it’s remarkable that they did two Fantastic Four, three Spiderman, a Daredevil and (by some count) four X-Men without ever doing any sort of overlap between them. Of course, factor in two Iron Man and (sigh) two Hulk, and since 2000, we’ve had fourteen Marvel pictures, damn near two a year most years. DC’s had two Batman (which reinvigorated the franchise) and one Superman (which damn near killed it, if it wasn’t only the best known of all superheroes) and I suppose broadly speaking you can count Watchmen, although I suspect everyone involved is running like hell from that one. And V for Vendetta, while I liked it, isn’t any part of the normal DC universe.

I guess the point is, don’t look for a film adaptation of Challenge of the Superfriends anytime soon.