Month: November 2011

1) We got the yips. We were too damn tight, we let the world talk us up, and we lost our shit.

2) I don’t like throwing a kid under the train, but Jelesky needs to run stairs until he vomits. Preferably before being allowed on the bus home tonight. We’re going to get a reputation and we’re going to deserve it. Cut. That. Shit. Out.

3) Yes, by rule the running-into-the-kicker call is correct. If this is LSU-Alabama, or Florida-Georgia, or the like, that flag doesn’t fly.  Which is doubly ironic considering that by rule, an inadvertent whistle is not reviewable.  Right up until it is.  Which is why…

4) The officiating in this game was a war crime. I’m not even talking about biased officiating – I’m talking about the sheer incompetence that goes along with calling a guy down who wasn’t down, blowing a whistle, and then dicking around for several minutes before finally deciding to cover up a mistake by either ignoring the rules or ignoring what happened. The SEC has surpassed the Pac-12 for officials who look like their first reaction to a rulebook is to color in it, and it’s an embarrassment to have that on the field in what is supposedly the best conference in football.

We had it, we gave it away. I’m not depressed, I’m not despairing, I’m just angrier than I’ve ever been after a loss.  Memo to the UT fans who are acting like they’re the national champions after beating a .500 team to pull within half a game of the ‘Dores in the SEC East: congrats.  I’m pleased that you’re so happy to be Auburn six days a week and Vanderbilt on Saturday.

We are getting there. We will get there. But we are not there yet.

Of which more later.

OK, let’s start with the obvious.  In the grand scheme of things, this game does not matter at all.  The sun will rise in the morning.  War will rage on in Somalia, Tibet will still be under the thumb of Red China, my house will still be standing irrespective of the result of events in Knoxville.

Add to this the following caveat: there is nothing I can do to affect this game.  Maybe if I’m there in the stands, I can contribute to the extra bit of noise or the one random shriek that causes a false start, or I contribute to the yell that rallies the spirits of our offense, or otherwise have some infinitely small impact on events.  But I’m over two thousand miles away, and I know intellectually that nothing I do – watch, don’t watch, play the stream on the radio instead, wear this shirt or that hat, sit here, stand there, drink this, hold my head a certain way, mumble the same things at every snap – nothing makes one tiny bit of difference.  Unless you are prepared to believe in the existence of a deity that takes an interest in the prayers of college football partisans and acts in the affirmative on their behalf, the fact of the matter is clear: there is the outcome of the game, and the influence I have on that outcome, and the Venn diagram of the two looks like a stripper’s fake tits.

Nick Hornby, in Fever Pitch, goes on at length about smoking goals in, or not smoking, or wearing this shirt or not listening to the radio or this or that – indeed, he describes a ridiculous ritual where he and his friends go to the sweet shop, buy sugar mice, bite the heads off, and throw the rest into the street as some sort of bizarre votive offering – because it worked once.  I have broken myself of all manner of Rain Man-esque behaviors at Cal games, though to be honest, it mostly stems from the failing fortunes of the team and my resulting diminished emotional engagement.  I myself almost drank myself blackout drunk one night because Vanderbilt was playing better against then-#1 Tennessee when I drank bourbon than when I drank Guinness.  I came within an eyelash of burning my apartment down in 2001 because Alabama was pounding Auburn relentlessly whenever I had my pipe going, and the fug of tobacco smoke was all the way down from ceiling to ankles.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen when you have abject confidence in the results.  If you know you suck, you don’t get enmeshed in all this.  If you know you’re going to win, you don’t have to bother.  It’s only when the result teeters on the edge of a knife, when things are close to perfectly balanced, that your mind starts to go to these places.  And when it’s perfectly balanced – Tennessee is at home, but Vandy is a 1.5 point favorite, the records are within a game of each other, we’re on an uptrend but they have the better physical talent, we’re healthier but they defend the run and the pass equally well, we keep allowing touchdowns in the final minute of the first half but they haven’t scored a point in the second half for over a month–

When things are so precariously perfectly even, and when you have an emotional investment in the team, it seems like anything – no matter how small, no matter how stupid, no matter how logically irrelevant – anything that might take that elephant on the head of a pin and tip its balance…well, if you can do it, you have to, right?

Last night, I tried to assuage my anxieties by looking at last year’s posts on Anchor of Gold around the time of the hire.  And what I saw was remarkable in retrospect…

 

Maybe this is realistic, maybe not, but here’s what I want to see:

Season one: more than two wins.
Season two: not less than 5 wins (including, by definition, at least one conference win)
Season three: not less than 6 wins (which would assume a bowl since they hand those out like candy now)
Season four: not less than 7 wins AND a bowl bid outside the 615 area code.
Season five: all of season four PLUS at least one big-ticket win over the Penitentiary of Tennessee, or some big-ticket foe like Florida or Alabama that we haven’t beaten in years.

 

If we win out the rest of the way, this season, we will hit my goal for season five.  This year.  Even if we were to lose everything the rest of the way and finish 5-7, as disappointing as that is, we’ve met the goal through season 2 a year ahead of schedule.

Ultimately, I suppose that’s all you can do.  Step back, take a look at what you have, and be thankful for it.  And whatever happens, happens.

I guess about eight hours from now, we’ll know how it worked out.

Anchor Down.  Sink the Vols.

One…two…three…four…five…six.  Six seconds, on average, from the snap of the ball to the official’s whistle to end the play.

On the sidelines, at the beginning of every quarter, you’ll see the Vanderbilt coaching staff and players holding up six fingers.  It’s nothing to do with the number of wins for a bowl, or the memory of Jay Cutler – it’s a reminder.  Six seconds.  Nothing about the game, nothing about the scoreboard, nothing about the bowl prospects.  No looking ahead, no looking back.  Nothing in the world matters but the next six seconds.

Right about the time I was leaving Vanderbilt for the last time, Mary Schmich was writing a soon-to-be-famous column in the Chicago Tribune that included the line: “Don’t worry about the future.  Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.”  Needless to say, Coach James Franklin has refined that down even further – every time the guys hit the field, there’s no thought of “what if we can’t stop them on this drive?” or “we need two touchdowns to make up the difference.”  Just one play.  Execute yours, stop theirs.  Six seconds.

Ironic that the number should be six.  If you look at the archetypal personalities in the Enneagram, the Six is one who seeks security and support, and lives in fear of being without support and guidance.  Anxiety and worry are the stock in trade for the Six.  If there’s one thing a Six will struggle with more than anything else, it’s the worrying, the fretting, the abiding dread of “what if?”

Coach has fixed that: ignore it.  Shut it out.  Do your job without worrying about how it will turn out, or worrying what could go wrong – just one hundred percent effort, six seconds at a time.  Don’t worry about six wins.  Don’t worry about six years since beating your arch-rival.  Don’t worry about the fact that this would only be the second such win since 1982. Don’t worry about the letdown next week against Wake.  Don’t think about the lack of a single road win all year.  Don’t think about the Vegas line making you the favorite on the road for the first time in decades in this matchup. Don’t think about the twelve times you’ve come into this game with five wins.  Don’t think about having lost all twelve.  Don’t think about the letdown in the last minute yielding a touchdown again.  Don’t think about whether their QB will come back and be 100% and throw darts all day. Don’t think about anything other than the matter at hand.  Focus on what’s in front of you, right this very instant, and do your absolute best. Then do it again.

Embrace the moment.  Be here now. Life is the next six seconds.

Go Dores.  Beat the Vols.

6) Harajuku, “I Dreamed A Dream” – Vanderbilt vs Mississippi State, Memorial Gym, February 1996.

This tape (yes, a Japanese DJ’s techno mixes of Broadway songs. I’m 100% straight) was in my Walkman on Senior Night for basketball.  I was up in one of the high balconies at Memorial watching warmups, and the Vandy team was running off the court just as the last line finished. “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”  That was the other moment at which I had the overwhelming premonition that I was never going to make it at Vanderbilt (the first, of course, being the “I’m never going to see what’s on the other side of that hill” moment on the first day I arrived).  So…yeah.

 

5) Sean Kingston, “Fire Burning” – Vanderbilt at St Mary’s, Moraga CA, November 2009

“Somebody call 9-1-1, shorty fire burnin’ on the dance floor…” Another bit of Top 40 pap to play pre-game in the bandbox gym up at St Mary’s, where the Vanderbilt faithful of the Bay Area had assembled to watch the Dores in the stopover game on their way to the Maui Classic for Thanksgiving.  John Jenkins gave a good account of himself in his freshman campaign, and AJ Ogilvy went all-out against a Gaels team chock-full of his fellow Aussies, but the night belonged to three players: Andre Walker, the consumate glue-guy and point-forward, Jermaine “Dolla” Beal, the swagger-ific point/lead guard, and Jeffery Taylor, who was the deadliest 44 in the Bay Area since Dirty Harry hung up his Magnum.  You can still find the highlight reel of all Taylor’s dunks that night on YouTube.  And for all that, we still barely escaped with a 2-point win.

 

4) Led Zepplin, “Good Times Bad Times” – Vanderbilt vs DePaul, December 2007

Just back from abroad, thoroughly depressed by being back in-country and back to my horrific job situation – but “Mothership,” the new Led Zep collection, was out on iTunes.  And I was playing it while watching Vandy-DePaul…and we came back from down twelve at halftime, down eighteen 4 minutes into the second half, and down eight in the last two minutes to force overtime. And won by six.  And of course, I was playing one song on a loop – which became the theme the rest of the way.

 

3) Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “Jackie Wilson Said” – Vanderbilt vs South Carolina, Vanderbilt Stadium, September 2008

Thursday night game on ESPN.  Home opener, with the Vandy freshmen all charging out of the inflatable helmet on the open side of the stadium to run down and across the field to the new student section at the other end.  Very nearly a perfect game – penalties and turnovers almost non-existent, Captain Munnerlyn held in check for the Gamecocks, and Justin Hawkins as the Vanilla Hammer of Thor, banging out the tough yards on the ground to run out the clock.  Sure it was a win, but it was the second straight victory over South Carolina – which meant that Vanderbilt now had back-to-back scoreboard on Steve Spurrier, who famously spent so many years badmouthing the Commodores when he had Florida to play with.  The first win of what would ultimately be a season for the ages.

 

2) M.I.A., “Paper Planes” – Vanderbilt Football, September-December 2008

This came up when somebody at Vandy posted a public Facebook event for the opening weekend of school called “NO ONE ON THE CORNER HAS SWAGGER LIKE US – Should Be A Shitshow Actually.”  For some reason this tickled my funnybone, and I had some vague sense that the lyric was from that song that sampled the Clash’s “Straight To Hell,” so I got it.  And it stuck.  The chorus with those four gunshots, the hammer cocking for the fifth, and then the cash register sound – well, that was the six wins, right?  The four we usually got, the fifth to get ready, and the sixth for paydirt and bowl eligibility.  I banged that song day in and day out for three months, until we finally knocked off Kentucky – in Lexington! – behind DJ Moore’s two touchdown catches on offense and two picks on defense.  And you can still find the lyrics in my post from the Music City Bowl…

 

1) Primal Scream, “Country Girl” – Vanderbilt vs Tennessee, Pete’s Tavern, San Francisco CA, February 2008

Tennessee was ranked #1 in the county – had just reached #1 the day before – and the great and the good of Team Commodore in San Francisco were all at Pete’s for the big matchup.  I started off on Maker’s Mark, and the team was going great guns.  Then I switched to Guinness, to save my liver and retain some function…and we swooned.  My duty was clear.  Straight whiskey the rest of the night.  I was to’ up from the flo’ up, make no mistake…but we won.  We took down our archrival and ruined their #1 ranking.  And for some reason, I played “Country Girl” on a loop about fifteen times all the way home.  Da Wife is surpassing tolerant.

 

I’d really like to have another song in this post in a couple days…

 

(cue Prodigy.  Or maybe The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.)

So it’s out.  The Kindle Fire is, if not in the hands of everyone, at least in the hands of the Usual Suspects – Mossberg, Pogue, Wired, Engadget, Gizmodo, the new kids like Wirecutter and the Verge.  And the sense, overwhelmingly is…that it’s not an iPad killer.  Not even close. In fact, more than once commenter has said that the #1 feature of the Fire is that it’s only $199.

Take a step back.  The Kindle Fire is a 7″ Android tablet, something that already exists (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has a 7″ form factor, and there are plenty of similar things available from your local cellular company).  The thing that Amazon has done is to try to take the best features of the iPad and bring them in on a device half the price.  To do so, they’ve had to be more like Apple than any other Android tablet – they have their own UI, their own App Store, their own provider of media content, and yes, they’ve removed some of the settings and features you’d normally find in an implementation of Android 2.3.

In fairness, this was probably the right move.  Android 2.3 is about a year old (which is doddering senility in Android years) and sufficiently patched and robust enough to plop a new UI on, for Amazon’s purposes.  And that’s where things really take a turn.  Because the Fire, upon further review, is everything the iPad was accused of being: namely, a device purely for consumption of content.

Think about it.  Not much you can do for communication or work: there’s no Bluetooth (and thus no hardware keyboard option), no calendar or contact app, certainly no cameras for video chat.  No 3G or GPS and thus no mapping.  Not even a notepad app.  And while I’m sure some of these things will be added in software, the out-of-box purpose is clear: you use this to buy things from Amazon and read/watch/listen to them.  Everyone is commenting on the “Android lag,” which I would have hoped would be reduced with a forked version of the OS; Amazon may not have done as much customization and optimization as I would hope for.

There are some odd choices, make no mistake.  The lack of a physical home button is a design choice that may be tricky for some; the lack of physical volume buttons even more so.  And with only 8 GB of onboard storage, and no expansion, watching movies will almost have to be a streaming-over-WiFi experience (the HD version of Iron Man 2, by comparison, is 4 GB when downloaded from the iTunes Music Store).  In every way imaginable, this is a 1.0 product in a way the iPad had the luxury of not being, thanks to the existing iOS infrastructure.

At this point, it’s not for me – and I say this mainly because I got the third-generation Kindle for Christmas last year.  Needless to say it’s not going to let me watch movies – but it’s better for viewing text than any LCD tablet out there, and the browser is plenty sufficient for Google Reader and Twitter in their mobile forms.  Add to that the unlimited 3G connection and the ridiculously long battery life, and what you have is a device that perfectly complements the iPhone – because even thought it supports Kindle, Nook and its own iBook apps, using the iPhone to read books is an exercise in eternal swiping and backlight-driven battery drain.  Charge up the Kindle, stick a few hours’ worth of podcasts and music on it (not too much, given the limited playback controls) and you can arrive from your flight with your phone still almost fully juiced.

In all likelihood, then, no Fire for me.  But I’m going to keep an eye on the next one.

Meanwhile, I’m caving to the paste-eater way and mulling over what I want from the iPad 3 which I intend to see next spring.  Of which more later.

I don’t talk much about work.  That’s for the best.  I often wonder, though, whether mechanics or doctors or lawyers or architects – or most any profession, really – has as much to roll their eyes about.  Day in and day out, somebody says that they don’t want to put their iPad on the company’s operating system.  Or that they need an email server for their computer.  Or that they want to bookmark Apple Mail on their browser – and when it’s explained that they can’t bookmark a program, they want to move all their bookmarks into Apple Mail. (Seriously, I just spent five minutes trying to explain the difference between a website and an application to somebody who still didn’t get it.  And I punted.)

Computers are not magic.  There are too many people willing to believe they are, and too many people eager to accumulate power for themselves by indulging that belief.  But it’s not a good idea for a technologist to inculcate in the end users a whole “this is magical stuff that you cannot understand” mentality.  It’s counter-productive, it means more work for the support folks, and ultimately, it results in a worse class of performance.

I’m not arguing here that everyone should be writing in Assembly and recompiling their own kernel and building the OS of their phone from source.  What I’m arguing for is the simple acts of basic competence and basic troubleshooting.  What is the network?  What is the operating system?  What are programs?  What are websites?  Do you know which cable is the power and which is the Ethernet? Have you tried quitting the program and starting it again?  How about logging out and back in?  HAVE YOU TRIED TURNING IT OFF AND ON AGAIN?

I mean, for Godsakes I’m not even asking people to learn to drive stick.  I’m asking people to distinguish between the steering wheel, the gearshift, the ignition key, the radio, the seat, the car, the road and which lane you’re in.

Never mind Chrome OS – Marc Andressen’s vision of the browser-as-OS has come true in many workplaces.  You have Word and Excel, and then everything else – email, PeopleSoft, Oracle, payroll and timecard – it all comes through one browser (as often as not IE, and way too often still IE6).  And the documents?  Those just pile up on the desktop.  Maybe with some folders if you’re lucky.

I think this is one of the reasons the iPad has so much appeal.  The extra layers imposed by the windowing-based interface are gone.  Browser?  Right there.  RSS?  There.  Calendar?  There.  No desktop, no documents, no file system.  If you’re getting at everything through a browser anyway, what does it matter the form of the browser?  Ask National Geographic whether they’re glad to have dumped Lotus Notes for Google Apps, which in turn is accessible from damn near anything in one form or another.

Ultimately, then, this is the solution we have gone with: take the average office drone, take his computer, and then engineer away anything he might use to screw it up.  Try to find some way to prevent Lois Lane from being trapped on the ledge – make the ledge bigger, put up a railing, make the windows smaller, only build five feet off the ground.  But how much time can you save if you can just explain to Lois what she needs to do to stay the hell off the damn ledge in the first place?

The rise and fall of the GOP primary field continues apace.  Herman Cain apparently shat the bed today in an interview with newspaper editors in Milwaukee – blaming low sleep and “all these things twirling around in [his] head” for why he couldn’t say whether he agreed with the President’s handling of Libya.

Which is as it should be.  Herman Cain shouldn’t go down because of accusations of sexual harassment, odious though they may be – he should go down because he is singularly unfit to be President, not least because of what appears to be willful ignorance regarding the rest of the world (the “Uzbecki-becki-becki-becki-stan-stan” moment being the shining example there).  Similarly, as others have said, Rick Perry shouldn’t go down because he stared into the camera unable to name which cabinet department he would eliminate – he should go down because he essentially represents George W. Bush without the intellectual rigor or the burden of self-awareness, and because if we can’t have Jed Bartlett we shouldn’t have to suffer through Bob Ritchie.

Now Michele Bachmann, she’s going down for all the right reasons – and among them, the most amazing quote of all time:

“If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

I realize that most people seem to have forgotten that a) Medicare is in fact a Great Society program and b) China is in fact a Communist country, rather than a model of state-supported capitalist oligarchy, but a person who aspires to be President and does not realize these things is a person who would be better served by inpatient therapy rather than media attention.  The phrase “dumbest bitch on the face of the motherfucking Earth” springs to mind.

And before either of them was Donald Trump, who mainly served as an existence proof of why NBC News should be shut down tomorrow, its assets resold, and the proceeds distributed to those made stupider by the likes of David Gregory and Matt Lauer over the past decade.

The reason these amazing clowns continue to get their day in the sun is due to the fact that, as Jon Chait has plainly laid out, “Republicans could [not] be making this any more plain: they do not want to nominate Mitt Romney.” Nor can the GOP be blamed for this: a candidate who has taken at least three sides of every conceivable issue over the past six years is categorically unsuited to a party-in-electorate for whom ideological fidelity is the lodestar of their belief system.  Multiple Choice Mitt is the polished, blow-dried, smooth-talking apotheosis of the Republican President-as-CEO ideal.  It would have worked a treat in 2000, or 2004.  It might have worked in 2008, with enough ideological separation from then-President Bush.  It is not working on the 2012 GOP primary electorate, because the “Tea Party” is the Republican base and always has been.  Like any primary electorate, they are more partisan than the electorate at large, and like any activist electorate, they would rather be right than compromise to win.

This is exactly what they want, and exactly what any Southern-based American politics specialist since 1980 could have predicted without breaking a sweat.  Abramowitz, Sabato, the Black brothers, Geer, they’ll all tell you the same: in a Southernized one-party political process, what the primary voters want is the person who will sling the shit.  They all ostensibly believe the same things, are on the same side of issues, agree what the issues actually are – the main point of differentiation is who can be the loudest, angriest, most opposed to the Negroes/Muslims/socialists/terrorists/Mexicans.  As soon as Trump was made a fool of, Michele Bachmann was right there on the high dive into the crazy pool.  Once Rick Perry – who had the advantage of a higher elected office and a Y chromosome – jumped into the race, he naturally took over.  Once he flaked and betrayed a hint of sympathy for the educational prospects of children of illegal immigrants, and publicly derailed his train of thought, Herman Cain took charge.  Now that his campaign is faltering on the twin rocks of documented grabbiness and a limited grasp of 6th grade geography, and is slowly being revealed as one big Fox News application essay, it’s going to be someone else’s turn.

Right now, polling suggests that will be Newt Gingrich.  I’ll repeat myself: if you were able to split Bill Clinton into one person who embodied everything people liked about the Big Dog and one who embodied everything people hated about him, you’d get Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich respectively.  And that’s before contemplating that Newt is the guy who decided not to strike until the iron had a decade or so to cool, and that pretty much anyone who pays attention already knows what they think of him.  As the Not-Mitt-of-the-week, he will be serviceable for a month or so.  As the prospective 2012 nominee, he’s Barack Obama’s golden ticket to four more years of hanging out at Ray’s Hell Burger and getting sideline seats to basketball games on aircraft carriers.

It’s not that the GOP doesn’t want to win, or that they couldn’t win in 2012.  It’s that the cupboard is bare after years and years of ideological purification, of Gypsy Moth retirements and Northeasterners going along to get along and Southern dominance of the party machinery.  The GOP took the same tack as the Democratic Leadership Council did in the early 90s: we have to move to the right.  But whereas the Democrats were trying to tack away from McGovern and Mondale and Dukakis, the Republicans were looking at Ford and Reagan and Dole and McCain and saying, not conservative enough.  And it may cost them the easiest shot at winning a Presidential election since 1980…or maybe 1932.

Don’t know that I’ve ever done so much sports blogging, but it is November after all.

Nothing good to say about Vandy today. Plain that they miss Festus Ezili down low, but more obvious that they still lack that certain something that has been missing as they crashed out of their last three tournament appearances. This should not be a problem for a team with this many seniors – someone has to step it up and make things happen. I’m still waiting for Jeffrey Taylor to answer the bell…

And Boise State drops out of the national title picture.  Live by the -and-0, die by the -and-0.

The thing that has become truly irritating about Boise State is that as soon as LSU beat Alabama, the conversation was immediately “does a one-loss Bama deserve a rematch over Boise State?”  Not a mumbling word about newly-#2 Oklahoma State, nor a Stanford team that will jump from 4th to 3rd if they beat Oregon tonight.

Boise State has milked the Cinderella shtick long past its sell-by date, and spun a one-point overtime win over the most overrated BCS team of the 2000s into some sort of argument that they are America’s True Undefeated Uncrowned Champions.  Despite playing a schedule that usually consists of “beat one middling BCS team to open the season and then run the table through the WAC”.

The downside, of course, is that we’ll go through all this again next year.  But the rule is simple: if you are going to complain about the SEC’s out-of-conference scheduling, you cannot advocate Boise State as a national contender, and vice versa.  Either strength of schedule matters, or it doesn’t.

Meanwhile, I’m afraid to say anything about Vanderbilt for fear of breaking the spell…

It’s not easy to come up with something every day. Even when I think of an idea, it goes right out of my head if I’m not careful – I have to write things down.

Last night was a good time, though – Vandy event, Bourbon and Branch, five cocktails on a school night. Getting there early is always good because you get to the Library early and have time to consult with the bartender. And yes, I do write down what I drink there. I should be making better notes than just the name of the drink, but I’m not that sharp.

I may be organizing the gathering for February when the Commodores come to town to deal with Stanford – I saw them three years ago, but we’re coming back as a College World Series team with the top recruiting class in the country. It might be nice to be the host. I need to find out where Dan Brown is plying his trade.

And meanwhile, despite some shaky play, Vanderbilt basketball won and covered tonight against Oregon. Any win you can walk away from…