Author: Stagger Lee

(To distract myself from basketball, I will revert to politics.  It’s for our own good.)

What’s more dangerous: a 25-foot crocodile, a 100-foot T-Rex, or a great white shark of ordinary size?  Now, imagine you have to fight them a mile out to sea – which one is most dangerous then?

People who are surprised at Newt Gingrich’s triumph in South Carolina just don’t know politics.  South Carolina is the cradle of the Confederacy.  It is the state that gave us Strom Thurmond and Jim DeMint and Joe “You Lie!” Wilson.  And it is therefore a place where the Southern style of politics reigns supreme – where policy differences are so slight that the entire race turns on personality and showmanship.  In other words, a state that will vote for whomever can sling the shit.

No one slings the shit like Newt.  Indeed, no one (bar perhaps Lee Atwater, another son of South Carolina) did more to complete the Southernization of American politics than Newt.  He offers the one thing the Confederate base treasures more than anything: red-meat demagoguery, heaping gobs of abuse seasoned with thinly-veiled racism.  In the Confederate mind, Gingrich is an intellectual, a legitimate genius who can easily take down the slick-talking socialist in the White House with the devastating force of his mighty brain.

Which just proves the extent to which the GOP base has separated itself from the reality-based community.  Here on planet Earth, Newt’s unfavorables are roughly double his favorables.  A CBS poll three days ago has Obama over Newt 50-39 in a theoretical November matchup, and that’s before people start paying serious attention.  I find it difficult to believe that the highly-notional Independent Voter is going to be attracted to a guy whose track record includes divorcing two women in the hospital, getting censured by the House to the tune of a $300,000 fine, shutting down the government in a fit of pique over his Air Force One seating arrangements, and writing terrible alternate history fiction in between speaking engagements bragging about how clever he is.

Republican insiders are already talking darkly about the possibility of a Gingrich run – not only that he could lose to Obama in historic fashion, but that he could simultaneously lose the House and leave the Senate safely in Democratic hands.  He has the potential to leave the structures of the GOP standing while simultaneously destroying it as an effective electoral force in 2012.

The only question now is how the party insiders will go about accomplishing the necessary Newt-ering.

“There is no way you can be Harvard Monday through Friday and try to be Alabama on Saturday.”

With those words, Art Guepe resigned the post of head coach at Vanderbilt University in 1962.  To date, he is the last Vanderbilt coach to have 100 games under his belt – and he sports a record of 39-54-7.  More to the point, his conference record in the SEC was 19-43-6, or a winning percentage of .324; fifty years after his resignation, no Vanderbilt coach has an SEC record over .300.

After World War II, Vanderbilt’s chancellor set up a series with Yale, in hopes of fostering rivalries with Vanderbilt’s aspirational peers.  When Vandy won the opening matchup in 1948 by a score of 35-0, Yale cancelled the rest of the series.  Shortly thereafter, the chancellor reached out to other small Southern private schools – Tulane, Rice, Duke, SMU – with an eye toward forming a conference of their own.  Duke was too attached to the UNC rivalry, and Rice and SMU didn’t want to give up the Cotton Bowl money they got from the Southwest Conference, and so the notional “Magnolia League” died on the vine.  By the mid-1960s, Georgia Tech and Tulane had left the SEC, and Vanderbilt was left as the only private school in the bunch – and the only one not chasing football success on a dead run.

You probably know how that worked out.  Five bowl games, ever.  This year’s seniors included nine players who are the only ones in Commodore history to play in TWO bowls.  Since 1982, Vanderbilt has won six games in a season exactly twice – 2008, and this year.

I say that to say this: the new-look Pac-12 is headed for SEC territory.  Academically, the California schools alone quite frankly beat the hell out of the SEC’s offerings (Texas A&M??  THEY SUPPOSED TO BE AAU) but with the coming of Larry Scott’s Imperial Patent Televisual Money Engine, the resources are in place for an SEC-style arms race.  And Washington has fired the opening salvo by basically shattering the pay scale for assistant coaches – half a million dollars for Cal’s recruiting coordinator and D-line coach Tosh Lupoi and similar money to turn Cal’s WR coach Eric Kiesau for the Huskies.  And now, Cal has to make a choice: to join the Pac-12 arms race, or sit it out and hope for the best.

Vanderbilt in 2011 is where Cal was in 2002: new coach makes an immediate impact and restores hope for the future.  The pain and drama of getting the SAHPC built is now being reflected as the ‘Dores attempt to build the indoor practice facility which every other SEC team has. (Although I suspect the tree-dwelling hippie problem will be less of an obstacle.)  But as the SEC’s own perpetual cash machine keeps spitting out dollars – matched by thousands of donors who resemble nothing so much as caricatures out of John Grisham and the profits of merchandising to the kinds of sidewalk alumni who make Justin Bieber fans look reticent – and I don’t think for a second that the Commodores can keep up with the kinds of resources generated by Alabama or Florida or LSU or Georgia or Tennessee or…you get the picture.

Football as tail-that-wags-the-dog has gone national.  Conferences are being realigned and torn up and remodeled around football and only football, to the exclusion of things like basketball and academia and geography (Boise State  and San Diego State in the BIG EAST? SERIOUSLY?) and those of us who would like to see some decent pigskin without selling our souls to ESPN are up against it.

I don’t have a solution, because there isn’t one. Cal’s donor base has been tapped to bleeding for the Memorial renovations, for the SAHPC, for saving baseball and rugby.  To come up with an extra million dollars a year to keep assistant football coaches, at a time when state budgets are still hemorrhaging red ink and other sports are being eliminated or slashed to the bone, is going to be beyond the pale. Without an Arillaga to stroke eight-figure checks to the athletic department on demand, or eighty years’ worth of money and merchandise from USC fans who never set foot in the state let alone on campus, Cal is back in the position of doing more with less.

Ultimately, there has to be some way to have reasonably big-time football without the crasser excesses of the modern game as practiced in the SEC or Big “12” – we should be able to play bowls and be on television without having to go the route of building stadiums that seat a hundred thousand or having our own television networks or the like.  But I don’t know how we get to that point, short of splitting the College Football Premier League off for its own contract and playoff system and hoping that the football equivalent of the Coca-Cola Championship is going to be plausible and satisfactory.

Meanwhile – Cal, Stanford, Notre Dame, Army, Navy, Vanderbilt, Rice, Tulane, maybe Georgia Tech?  It’s a start…

I took a swing at Google’s new flagship device today – in a Verizon store, which seems to be the only way to see it.  Indeed, it’s the only way to see Ice Cream Sandwich in the wild at the moment, unless you already had a Nexus S and got it pushed out.  First impression: it isn’t any more intuitive to me than Gingerbread was, it’s plenty zippy but I don’t know how much is processor upgrade and how much is OS improvement, and it’s a freakin’ slab.  I know it’s 1280×720, but if I’m having trouble with something on a 3.5-inch screen, it’s not going to make a substantive difference giving me a 4.5-inch screen instead.

Gruber’s theory is that all the new Android phones are 4-inch and up (and largely clustering around 4.5) because they need to be that size to accommodate a battery that can go all day and/or handle the demands of LTE-based 4G.  Makes sense to me, plus if you consider the percentage of the population that carries a purse, a big-ass phone isn’t such a big deal.  Maybe something like a Galaxy Nexus (or Droid RAZR or whatever) would work in a suit jacket pocket if it’s flat and light enough.

Thing is, I’d like to take the time to get familiar with Android, but I can’t splash out hundreds of dollars on a phone that may never get an OS upgrade.  The ongoing struggle to get a commitment out of Samsung to update the original Galaxy S line (and it doesn’t look good) and the strange silence out of the update consortium – not to mention the pile of tablets and phones out there still being sold new with Android 2.3 – doesn’t help the notion that buying an Android device means you’d better be prepared to live with that iteration of the OS for the life of the gadget.

Meanwhile, a week with this year-old MacBook Air has sealed it for me: I’m good for now with technology.  All my work and personal apps run just fine, up to and including Apple Remote Desktop and flash-based ESPN3 coverage of Vanderbilt basketball.  It’s light enough and the battery is satisfactory enough that for now, I don’t feel compelled to run out and splash out on a notional iPad 3 when the opportunity presents itself.  So as I more or less guessed, the Kindle splits the difference for reading material and emergency RSS/Twitter while the phone still covers most everything else, especially if I can top up the battery on days when I’ll be out in the evening.

Along similar lines, there’s a very real chance I might be switching to a Verizon phone with the next iteration of the iPhone, just in time for my contract to expire.  Not only would it save me an extra $40 a month for work to take over my phone, but it’s possible the Verizon phone, like the current iPhone 4S, could be used on the CDMA/EV-DO network in this country yet unlocked for GSM service abroad.  One phone to rule them all – no more travel phone and no more temptation to buy a secondary unlocked phone just to have smartphone options abroad.  And of course, that would mean the Verizon options – separate data and tethering, unlimited data but no simultaneous voice use, et cetera.  LTE as well?  Who knows, although one would think by summer it’ll be a more plausible option.

But for now, I’m safely ensconced in last year’s versions across the board – iPhone, MacBook Air and Kindle alike – and I couldn’t be happier with the results.

It’s exactly what you’d expect from a place described with three simple words: “hipster grilled cheese.”

And yet, it’s hard not to think that this is the direction fast food is headed and they just got there first.  Simple organic ingredients.  Gluten-free bread where required.  All the packaging is either compostable or is in cans (including PBR, natch, but also champagne-in-a-can of the sort my surrogate sister brings to parties). Your options for sweetening the tea are either stevia or raw sugar.  Metal trays and baskets instead of cheap plastic.

In short, it’s a mild variant on the In N Out model: make one thing (albeit with several variations in this case) and make it well.  Soup and grilled-cheese sandwich – sure, it buys into the same re-juvenile phenomenon that helps propel the cupcake shop down the way, but it’s also classic comfort food at a time when people really do want to be comfortable.

Hell, it was tasty enough for me to visit a couple of times this week, even with the temperatures unseasonably warm at noontime.  I can only imagine that it’d go down even better were it actually 45 degrees out.

I guess it’s always been this way, especially back in the old country, but more than ever I get the sense that most people in this country think of “criminal” the way someone else might think “Dalek” or “Cylon” – that criminals are a unique and distinct and fungible class, separate and irredeemable.

The war on drugs/crime/illegal immigration/terrorism/whatever has not particularly helped with this.  Going back to the “law and order” fixation of the Southern Strategy Republicans of the late 60s, there’s always been some sort of bogeyman.  The criminal of the 70s was most likely the New York City street mugger, displaced in the 80s and 90s by something drug-related (probably crack).  In the last ten years, with violent crime trending lower than it has in decades, the new thing to be scared of is the “lone wolf terrorist” (whether Idaho white supremacist or Al-Qaeda sleeper-cell operative) – and now the general fear is that vast armies of criminals, probably drug-related, will pour undocumented into the US from elsewhere.

This came to mind this morning, when word came out that one of the prime suspects in one of the most famous “white girl missing somewhere” cases of the last decade has either been convicted or pled guilty to some other murder somewhere else.* Which, in the court of public opinion, serves mainly to confirm the guilty verdict already pronounced by television earlier.  Consider also Casey Anthony, this decade’s necessary object lesson that the judgements of cable news are not, in fact, legally binding (a role previously served by OJ Simpson and the assorted officers who beat the hell out of Rodney King).  Once you get that scarlet C, you are officially A Criminal, and thus beyond any form of redemption.

This also comes to mind with the rash of pardons granted by Haley Barbour on his way out the door as governor of Mississippi.  This seems to happen anytime somebody gets pardoned, largely because there seems to be some misunderstanding of the nature of a pardon.  As a rule, most pardons go to people whose sentences have already been carried out – it’s a question of expunging the record so they can get jobs elsewhere, or vote again, or what have you.  In other words, a pardon clears off that scarlet C, and the notion that A Criminal might somehow cease to be A Criminal is tough for some people to wrap their heads around.

That notion of the undifferentiated criminal also informs gun control legislation – or opposition to it, when people assert that “criminals will always be able to get guns.”  Which is comical on the face of it – you go down to CrimCostCo, show your card that identifies you as A Criminal, and walk out with a buggy full of assault rifles and handguns free of charge.  What could be easier? Given that the bulk of violent crime is committed by someone the victim knows, though, it stands to reason that most criminals are getting their guns the way anyone else does – gun shop, Wal-Mart, pawnshop, bought it off a guy at the swap meet, whatever.  Theft is certainly out there, but I would think that the main point of stealing guns is for resale value, especially if you can stick one in your pants and hock it later for five hundred dollars.

Nevertheless, since A Criminal has access to the kind of firepower normally associated with Navy SEALs, it’s necessary for the police to be adequately armed in response.  Which is how we went from a cop with a big six-shot .357 Magnum on his belt, a billy club and maybe a shotgun in the trunk to two cops with Glocks, three magazines and fifty-plus rounds, body armor, a flashlight that doubles as a club, a taser (occasionally confused with the gun on BART platforms), pepper spray, and military-style rifles in the trunk.  And thus we get “Don’t tase me bro” and UC-Davis students getting casually hosed down with chemical weapons and all manner of “less lethal” weapons, and the public goes along, because obviously anyone at whom the police point a weapon must of necessity be A Criminal.  And when the cop’s taser turns out to actually be a gun, or the perpetrator’s gun turns out to be a wallet, or a SWAT team breaks into the wrong house, the public lets it go, because in a War On Crime there are bound to be casualties and unfortunate incidents.

Because the War on Crime is not far removed from the War On Terror.  In both cases, the premise is the same: you have something to fear, and you must allow us power without restraint if you are to be protected.  And for some people, the fear means that they themselves have to be armed to the teeth.  Either way, the message is the same, and it remains: live in fear. And like any other animal, a frightened nation is dangerous – not least to itself.

 

 

* Details not important because a) the whole point of the fungibility of crime is that one Shady Individual Who Probably Killed This White Girl is not materially different from another, and b) I couldn’t give a shit if I tried.

Well, depending on how you count, that’s either number 9 or number 14.  On the one hand, I think Alabama’s claim to a title in 1941 is risible at best, but on the other hand, it’s the acme of ridiculous to assert that somehow college football had no champions in almost seven decades before the AP poll got going.  Either way, the team of my childhood now has a pretty solid claim to being the most decorated school of all time with national championships.

And it should have been pretty obvious where this was headed.  The underdog always seems to have an advantage in BCS bowls, making better use of the six-to-eight-week layoff – consider how Utah defenestrated Alabama three years ago – but there’s also the small consideration that Alabama hasn’t lost a 1-vs-2 bowl game with title implications since round about Watergate.  If you were betting on history, Alabama was the bet – and if you saw the 41 point line in Vegas and took the over, you don’t deserve to have that money.  That wasn’t a wager, that was an IQ test.

It felt weird to have no rooting interest in the game.  I was so nervous about the 2009 matchup that I couldn’t watch it live – but that was different: it was Texas, it was Pasadena, it was Rose-Bowl-by-proxy for the first time in sixty years plus, it was having a Heisman winner on the Bama bench and Keith Jackson tossing the coin.  Or as I said then…

No shit-talking here. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to present as some sort of born-again Alabama fan now, after all these years of dissociating myself from the state and the fandom. If I’m honest, the Crimson Tide have been my fourth football team at best since about 2000, behind the Redskins and Vandy and Cal. So as much as it does mean to me to beat Tennessee and Auburn, as much as this would have meant to me fifteen years ago – I can’t lie: I will be DVR’ing the game and attending a theology class on Thursday night.

And there we go.

For a Cal follower, there were some nasty flashbacks watching LSU, as Les Miles inexplicably stuck with a quarterback who was plainly not fit for purpose – only to watch him get ground into powder by an inexorable force.  For a connoisseur of defense, there was the pleasure of watching maybe the best Bama defense of all time – barring neither 1961, 1979 nor 1992 – shut out a team that had averaged forty points a game against the best schedule in the country and finish #1 in all four categories (rushing, passing, scoring and total defense).  For most neutral observers, watching after years of Big XII pinball offense and Oregon hurry-up, a game with five field goals and a missed PAT on the lone touchdown was too dull for words – which says more about the nature of the ESPN hype machine than anything, and the World Wide Leader’s de facto ownership of the sports has done more than even the BCS to bring down the quality of the game.

The one bright point for folks outside the Yellowhammer State is that other conferences will probably be more amenable than ever to considering the SEC’s oft-tabled proposal for a plus-one system.  1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3 on New Years Day, in existing bowls, the winners to face off a week later in a title game.  This, to me, is the best option – the “least sufficient privilege” as an Apple developer would put it.  For one thing, it explicitly doesn’t provide a seat on the starship for every conference champion; the ACC and Big East have done a good job of proving the fallacy that winning your league entitles you to a prize bowl.  For another, it’s sufficient – when was the last time a team from outside the top five had a legit claim to a national championship?  Not to a BCS bowl berth, mind – if you’re top-10, you probably ought to be there, although 9 and 10 should probably be restricted to the Fiesta Bowl only and leave the Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange for the big boys.  But if you have to argue that you should be the #4 team in the country, you probably don’t have a very good argument that you should be #1.

So where does that leave us this year?  LSU-Stanford and Bama-OkieLite.  I have to think that we wind up with the same matchup as last night, albeit with the yapping muted – bar perhaps Oregon fans arguing that they beat Stanford head-to-head and deserve the shot.  At which point the usual suspects will crank up again, and no one will stop carping until there’s a 16-team tournament and the Sun Belt winner is free-rolled in, and even after that some people won’t be pleased until Boise State gets a national championship…

It’s college football.  If you need an epitaph for this horrible season just brought to a close, make it this: nobody deserves anything.

I drove to work today.  Partly because I’m the only one covering the office today and needed to be there as the doors opened, partly to accommodate a run to a meeting offsite (which itself got cancelled thanks to being the only one covering the office today), and partly because I was carrying one metric shit-ton of stuff to work (two laptops and a replenishment of my morning oatmeal supply).  And the key to that loadout was the fact that it was 43 degrees when I left home this morning – but it’ll be about 60 when I get back and damn near 70 at lunchtime.

See, the problem is that 15-degree delta between Leaving Home and Returning Home, which is generally more of a 20-degree delta between Leaving Home and Going To Lunch.  Thing is, when I lived in DC, that was less of an issue – in winter the delta was usually between 25 and 40 degrees, or else between 75 and 90 degrees.  You either need no coat at all or a heavy coat all the time – only in spring and a tiny mid-autumn window did you have the problem of mid-40s to mid-60s.

The problem with Northern California is that its climate is basically Late April In Alabama twelve months a year.  Which is to say it can be hot as balls, unseasonably cold (without snow!), or like it is now: cold as a brass brassiere in the morning and warm enough for no coat and short sleeves by lunchtime.

Because my shoulder has been playing up in recent weeks (and it’s a little disturbing to consider that I’ve been working on this shoulder off and on for over two years now), I have reverted from my Timbuk2 messenger to an older backpack suitable for putting over both shoulders and carrying my entire office in.  (This was twelve and a half pounds until this weekend; with the switch to the MacBook Air it’s down under ten.)  Said backpack is patently unsuitable to go over almost all my heavier apparel – the ridiculous suede jean-jacket, the peacoat – but my lighter outerwear isn’t really solid enough to hold up to walking to work in 42 degrees of a January morning.  More to the point, nothing that can stand up to 42 degrees in the morning will stuff INTO the backpack for the 65 degree walk home at 5 PM.

So today I went with something lightweight since I didn’t actually have to wear the backpack. In days to come…maybe not.  I still have yet to deploy the new Rickshaw X-Pac super-light messenger, which might well shave off another three pounds or so, and that would go over just about any jacket – but then we’re back to the problem of “any coat that’s warm enough in the morning is ridiculous in the afternoon.”

The obvious solution here – or so the natives tell me – is “layers layers layers.” However, there are a couple of problems with this.  For one, when you work in an overly-warm building, you’re going to be shedding just as many layers as if you’d worn one big coat, and for another, what the layers get you is more things to stuff in the backpack, tie around the waist, etc etc – especially once precipitation comes into the equation.  Not that it’s been a problem this winter, more’s the pity (rain in January = flush in August) but it’s something to keep in mind.

Nevertheless, it may be the only way to go.  The heavy stuff which was far more suitable in Eastern winters pretty much has to go by the boards for workdays, barring a serious cold snap,* and the move has to be toward light weight and presentability, most likely with an increased use of T-shirts under the nice work shirt. In the long run, I think the move will be to go to the messenger bag over the good shoulder (I am assured that as long as it comes in under ten pounds, it’s not going to be a significant stressor) and most likely go with the old reliable black rain shell doubled with my WWDC hipster warmup thingy.  Yep, layers.  At least the WWDC piece crams up tiny and could get stuffed in the bag in a way that a wet shell couldn’t…

 

 

*BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA(gasp)BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

 

 

 

 

 

It’s real. The One Laptop Per Child foundation has skipped right past the much-debated, long-delayed dual-display second-gen laptop and is apparently ready to deliver the tablet.

And at first glance, it’s amazing.  8-inch display on what looks like an original OLPC XO-1 with the keyboard half ripped off, able to run either Sugar or (!!) Android.  Bear in mind that the original XO-1 did have a touchable screen, so the idea of running Sugar on a tablet isn’t utterly insane, but a bare-bones install of Android might be a better idea if you want to keep the “open source” idea and still run the kind of things you’d want in a first world non-education setting.

Which I do, believe me.  At $100 – and they think the production cost may come in even lower – this is as bare bones as you can get, but it’s a ruggedized 8-inch tablet that you could take out in the woods and recharge with a hand crank (literally), or take on a trip and not sweat it if you drop it into the Thames.  It’s probably too big to go in a coat pocket, but it’s proof of concept that you can build a tablet for a hundred bucks that brings a value proposition to the table.

Gizmodo aptly points out that the XO-1 was basically the existence proof of the netbook, which Asus brought to market and everyone else jumped on.  The XO-3 may be the existence proof of the cheap-and-cheerful Android tablet, quite possibly the first way ever to get computing into a household for under a hundred bucks.

All I can say is – the day they announce a Give One Get One for these things, the credit card is shooting out of the wallet all by itself.

* 30-point win today for Vandy men, holding Auburn to the lowest output of any Commodore opponent since the shot clock came into effect in college ball.  If that kind of defense stands up the rest of the way, we may pull out of this slide after all.

* By way of celebration, I got my slice of Big Sur at Pizza My Heart with two servings from the Coca Cola Freestyle machine.  Most soda I’ve had all year.

* I have come to realize that I can watch time-lapse photography of particulate matter pretty much anywhere, any time. This U-Verse Showcase channel is showing clouds and fog and mist off a pond and I cannot turn away.  I might need to check that pizza for weed next time.

* It’s 67 degrees and sunny today.  Spring is here!

* I think I have finally ironed out the last bits of trouble migrating away from my MacBook Pro and changing the setup to Mac mini for home and MacBook Air for work (and using ARD and Screen Sharing to get at my upstairs computer).  I’m a little surprised that with everything installed and configured, I still have 196 GB of free space – guess that’s the side benefit of not having my iTunes content on this machine.  What’s going to be really interesting is whether the combination of this machine, the iPhone and the Kindle are enough to obviate the need for even an iPad 3.

* I had something to blog about that had nothing to do with technology, politics or Vanderbilt sports, and now I’ve clean forgotten what it was.  However I am sure it will rate a full post when I get back to remembering it.

Four years ago, I looked dubiously at the brand new MacBook Air and declared it ideal for the CxO wanting to look slick in the first class lounge, and said  that Apple was trying to create “an entirely new market segment for mid-life crisis computers.”

Today I took over a 13″ MacBook Air, one generation from new, and was delighted to get it.

The revised form factor helped, obviously – two USB ports and no flap to wrangle with – but the use of current processors and solid state drives helped make the leap possible, as did the battery changes. Now, the 13″ Air is arguably Apple’s de facto Macintosh, the machine they have in mind when designing the likes of Lion.

Me, I’m just happy to slice a quarter of the weight out of my daily commute bag, possibly with more to come yet.