Are my eyes really blue?

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: Verizon sucks. Yes, much has been made of the fact that they have coverage “everywhere” (patently not true), but this is largely offset by a number of factors: mainly that they’re a CDMA/EV-DO carrier, which means shorter battery life, a smaller selection of devices, and an almost total inability to easily switch carriers or roam abroad (no buying that Chinatown phone and popping your SIM in it with the big red V). And to make matters worse, they are notorious for making asinine decisions (disabling Wi-Fi on their handsets, forcing their own standardized interface in place of the manufacturers, replacing Java J2ME compatibility with the laughable BREW standard) and worst of all, taking every opportunity to nickel-and-dime you for things like transferring the photos off the phone. If you want your mom to have a nice reliable phone to make calls on, sure, get her the freebie on Verizon, but if you want to *do* anything with your smartphone, run like hell and stay there.

Verizon Wireless was formed by the merger of GTE, Ameritch, Bell Atlantic and a couple other nubs who bet their early digital cellular on CDMA, and their setup has always been exactly what you’d expect from a Baby Bell: you’re incredibly privileged just to be on our network, so you’ll shut up and pay what we want from you and take what we give you. For crying out loud, even the biggest control freaks in the industry eventually set up an app store and a developer model and made it possible to record your own ringtones. If you’re going to be tighter than Apple, you’d damn well be able to create a user experience that makes the lame to walk, the blind to see, and restores the virginity of Stanfurd Dollies.

To date, Verizon’s flagship smartphone was the Blackberry Storm, a device so shudderingly godawful that Stephen Fry – who is a complete slave to every new smartphone that comes down the line, the man once travelled with SEVEN iPhones – gave it a half-star and heaped opprobrium on it. But today comes the announcement that Verizon will be offering Android phones – as in the Google phone OS, as in the first thing to legitimately challenge the iPhone’s crown as King Of All Smartphones.

Couple of possibilities here.

One is that this really is the rapture. Google phone on Verizon, complete with Google Voice out of the box as the default system, completely open to apps and modification, fully-featured and able to go anywhere Verizon has a signal – which, as old analog spectrum gets repurposed, gets better all the time. The other possibility is that Verizon continues with its efforts to get a nickel every time you touch the phone, imposes its own interface, charges you extra to access GPS and Wi-Fi, and basically makes a mockery of Google’s promises about an “open platform.”

The wild card in all this, of course, is LTE, the 4G standard that Verizon and AT&T are both moving toward. With the two main carriers migrating to an interoperable network for the first time, it will finally be conceivable to easily move between them with the same equipment. Which, in theory, should make life a lot more interesting – not to mention better – for the wireless consumer.

And to cap it all off, the FCC is explicitly committing themselves to network neutrality – which has already paid dividends, as AT&T has today opened their 3G network to VoIP traffic. Skype without Wi-Fi, anyone? It’s not much, but based on today, it’s possible that mobile tech in the United States is starting to nudge ever so slightly into the 21st century. Not a minute too soon either.

…and not a team in our household has one.

Vandy returned 18 starters, but Larry Smith – who had one start before this year – is struggling. And Cal’s opponents are stacking eight and nine in the box to stuff the run, but Kevin Riley – well, as one uncharitable blog commenter put it, “couldn’t hit the broad side of his mother.” As for the Redskins…well, they’re beyond help at this point, and there’s a real possibility of blood in the streets if they don’t put down the Bucs tomorrow.

Tedford, Johnson, Zorn, Cerrato and Snyder…fuck you all for making me think about claiming the Crimson Tide again.

…all sorts of bloggers are saying “Fire Tedford? Have you lost your mind? Do you know what it was like before he was here?”

Well, as a matter of fact, I know exactly what it was like, and it’s called Vanderbilt. And I assure you, if the Commodores were to find themselves suddenly in a position where they were regularly being ranked and winning 7 or 8 games and a bowl every year, I and those like me would be over the moon.

But if they lost every time they played in Mississippi, never beat Florida the whole time, couldn’t get into the SEC title game – well, we have a word for that too, and it’s called “Tennessee for most of Steve Spurrier’s reign at Florida.”

Look, I’m not saying “fire Tedford” at all. I’m saying that if you want to get to a level beyond where Cal is now, he may not be the guy to get you there. In one respect, Cal is unfortunate in that their rise back to respectability dovetailed almost precisely with Pete Carroll’s arrival at USC and the corresponding Trojan revival. But think about the games USC has lost in that span: almost always on the road, and always by a narrow margin. Two questions should loom huge:

1) When’s the last time USC got blown out?

2) When’s the last time USC lost a huge game?

For 1), I honestly can’t think of one. And for 2), the only one that springs to mind is the Rose Bowl against Texass (sic) – the 3-OT loss to Cal in ’03 was of a piece with the losses to Oregon State or Stanford. Now if Cal had won in ’04, the world would look very different today – but that’s neither here nor there.

Bottom like: USC wins in the clutch. Cal rarely does. Even though I’ll probably be there Saturday night, freezing my nuts off, I’m not kidding myself, because for all his success, Tedford hasn’t met the Ric Flair standard: if you wanna be the man, you gotta BEAT the man.

My paternal grandmother was my introduction to death.

She had a stroke about a year before she died, and my father and his two brothers drew up a rotation, and two or three nights a week, we were over at my grandparents’ house making dinner and looking after the two of them. When she finally died, it was the first time I was cognizant of anyone I knew dying. (It didn’t help that Bear Bryant shuffled off this mortal coil before the month was out, too.)

Well, my grandfather had been more or less a subsistence farmer until the two boys were old enough for high school. At some point (I guess before the third was born, but not by much) he went to work in the steel business for a couple of decades. All this is by way of saying that when he found himself a widower at age 70, he was not really well-prepared for domestic life by himself. And so everybody continued to look after him – and in our case, that meant he came to dinner on Tuesday nights. It must have started that spring, but it was a going thing for over a decade – because in 1993, when I went to pick up my new Saturn, my first task after bringing it home was to go collect him for dinner.

I guess it must have petered out sometime while I was at Vandy, because I don’t think he was coming over by the time I came home that first summer. Of course, even though he was limited in how well he could take care of himself, he held on pretty good for another decade after that before dying only a day or two short of age 91. Given that three of my father’s four grandparents and his dad lived into their 90s, I’m pretty sanguine about the quality of my Y chromosome…of course, given how well-preserved my maternal relatives were despite decades of unfiltered cigarettes and radiation exposure, my X could be pretty money too.

Anyway, it’s flabbergasting to think that all that started over 25 years ago. There are big pivotal events in my life that were 2/3 of my life ago. When you contemplate how much time has gone by, it seems absurd that the midpoint of my life now is somewhere in my freshman year of undergrad, because that second half has FLOWN by comparison. But the wife has it right: every year goes by quicker than the last. All the more reason not to dawdle.

Get used to it: Dan Snyder, the little half-a-bastard who owns the Washington Redskins, is only 43 years old. There is every chance he will have control of this team for the next four decades. There is every possibility that the Skins are going to be the new Oakland Raiders: trapped under the thumb of an owner with no grip on reality and surrounded by sycophants with no ability to run a football program.

After two decades, it looks like my NFL team could well be in a death spiral for the rest of my life.

SO much to look forward to…

“Nobody knows nothin’.”

Never has this been more true than this September. Three of the top six teams in the AP poll went down to defeat this weekend, all to unranked opponents. The number of ranked teams upset in the month is greater than I can remember, and the inconsistency is all over the place. The only thing you can count on is that there will be fear and loathing and gnashing of teeth in Florida, as Tim Tebow is being held overnight with symptoms of concussion after leaving the stadium in the back of an ambulance halfway through the 3rd quarter in Lexington.

Right now, I think you have to say that Alabama is probably the top team in the country, passing Texas based on the fact that the Longhorns haven’t played anyone worth mentioning (a win over Virginia Tech utterly trumps a win over the TTs at this point) and passing Florida based on the fact that if Tim Tebow isn’t there, that team doesn’t go. The biggest question mark in the SEC is “what happens when an offense built around one player loses that player?” If there’s not another five-star prep option QB waiting in the wings, Florida may hit a bump.

As for the Commodores, well, if you can’t get well against Rice you may not ever get well. But it’s not a conference win, and 0-2 in the SEC is not promising with the kinds of threats on the horizon (the aforementioned Florida, a Georgia team with a knack for the great escape, a South Carolina squad that just knocked off #4). However, next week is home against Ole Miss, a team that was inexplicably overrated coming into the year and got exposed by a South Carolina defense that hasn’t contained Vanderbilt the last two seasons. A win over the Rebs would go a long way toward putting Team Commodore back on the straight and narrow.

For the first time in a long time, I find that I can watch games all Saturday, doesn’t matter who’s on, there’s something worth seeing. And that is a very pleasant development.

Disasterbation, n. the act of supporting Cal football. orig. Stagger Lee, Sept. 2008.

To quote directly:

In retrospect, it should have been obvious to a small child that this is the way to beat Cal this year: stack the box to stop the deadly Jahvid Best, overload on the pass rush, and force a quarterback in his first full season to make plays to receivers with a combined total of four catches and no starts when the season began.

Well, another year hasn’t improved things much. Oregon did just that, and at last check are up 39 on the Golden Bears. After losing to Boise State, everybody wrote off Oregon, and neglected to look up when they pounded Utah, and now the hayseed hippies of UC-Eugene are delivering the worst defeat of the Tedford era.

This is a team loss in every sense of the word. Offense: feckless. Defense: helpless. Special teams: anytime your superstar punter delivers a punt for five yards, you know how special teams are doing.

It’s time to ask the question: is Jeff Tedford capable of delivering a must-win game? Think about it: since 2002, when’s the last time Cal won a significant victory against a meaningful opponent? They had to miracle out wins in bowls against Virginia Tech and Air Force and Miami, they’ve still never won in Los Angeles under Tedford, the Texas Tech fiasco is known to all and sundry. The Oregon State loss in 2007 when a win would have sent Cal to #1 in the country. The Big Game that year when a win might have salvaged the biggest collapse since the walls of Jericho.*

Tedford’s big kills are: a triple-OT win at home against USC in 2003 and a Holiday Bowl disemboweling of Texas A&M. Other than that, the team has struggled against teams it should beat, frequently backed into wins against teams it should have blown off the field, and – reliably – lost every single consequential road game since 2002.

Jeff Tedford has hitherto gone unchallenged by a fan base of Old Blues who remember the age of Tom Holmoe and haven’t seen a Rose Bowl in fifty years and are just grateful to be televised and ranked. And if you are happy with 8 wins a year, occasional bouts of top-25 ranking, and a rock-solid home record, and can live with being a sub-500 team on the road and spitting the bit at the most pivotal moment, that might be enough. But the day is coming, and coming soon, when people start asking what it’s going to take for the Bears to finally break through.

* A collapse surpassed the next year by Vanderbilt, who lost to the likes of Mississippi State and Duke in the course of pissing away a 5-0 start.

New Wayfarer by Ray-Ban, model 2132, tortoise frame, lens 902/57 (brown polarized), 52/18mm. See, Sunglass Hut, they DID make a brown polarized New Wayfarer.

I lost my shades at the beach house last month. Fortunately, it turns out my sister-in-law found them. Which saved me an impulse purchase of another hundred-something bucks. Because I’ve basically come to realize that the Preds, the Oakleys, the little silver-blue things from back in ’02, all the other stuff – it breaks down in the face of the single most iconic form of eyewear on the planet. Besides, I can’t remember the last pair of sunglasses I kept successfully for three years – except I can and they were black Wayfarers that I got my first year at Vandy and hung onto in some form for a decade. Even after the eyepieces went wide from leaving them in the car one year at City Stages, and believe me, you can leave a car in the shade but in Alabama it’ll still get hotter than hell.

All this is just so I have a record of what I need to replace them with when things go awry. =)

“But Obama has made it even more explicit, regularly proclaiming his determination to rely on rational analysis, rather than narrow decisions, on everything from missile defense to Afghanistan — and all the big issues at home.”

And the problem here is….?

Memo to the Washington Post: if you don’t want to finish as the fish-wrapper division of Kaplan Test Prep, it’s way past time to put David Broder in a home.

So apparently tomorrow, we’re finally going to get MMS on the iPhone. Assuming you have a 3G or 3GS, that is. And of course, since it’s AT&T, there’s no telling how well it will work if at all.

This represents the rare-but-not-unheard-of phenomenon of Apple guessing wrong. A lot of things that they’ve done in the last 15 years or so were good guesses, mostly regarding legacy features that could be dumped (SCSI? ADB?) or premium products marketed brilliantly (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”) or features that could be ditched without consequence (i.e. 2009 before releasing an iPod with FM radio).

But back in the days when the iPhone was under development, I am willing to bet that Himself made a bet: that given the opportunity, people would eschew sending postage-stamp-sized pictures for a quarter a pop when they could email a full-sized pic for free. And thus MMS support didn’t make it into the iPhone. Of course, since MMS is a data service, it’s possible to cram other things in there, and once video messaging became part of the package, MMS suddenly took off.

Which left Apple in a bad spot again, because at the time, the hottest camera in phones was a 2 MP camera that still took, at best, 176×144 video. And there’s no nice way to put it: that looks like shit. And as I said two years ago, the reason the iPhone doesn’t take video is because Himself won’t let it until there’s a way for it to take video that doesn’t look like ass.

It seems that day has come – iPhone and Nano alike now take 640×480 at 30 fps, which is equivalent to standard-resolution television or the low-end Flip camera. Which is good enough for Himself. Better late than never, but the two year delay is the price of the mentality that keeps Apple in a premium price niche (and keeps the stock bumping around 180).

And so we get to the final delay: AT&T. On the day that iPhone OS 3.0 went live, with MMS capability, 29 of Apple’s 30 carrier partners were live with MMS service. Guess which one wasn’t?

And this is because unlike SMS, which rides on the control channels for free, MMS is a data service. And as we have proven over and over and over and FUCKING OVER, AT&T’s network is not up to handling the data requirements of the installed base of iPhone users. Adding an additional data capacity to the phone will only increase the load on what is already a weary and wobbly network, especially in New York and San Francisco.

The iPhone has customer satisfaction ratings that most manufacturers would sacrifice their children for, but the number-one complaint of owners – by a huge margin – is the AT&T network. And rightly so.