Author: Stagger Lee

So Ben Nelson is packing it in.  After years of sabotaging the Democrats from the inside, and voting with Teabaggers over and over to “protect his viability for re-election,” the Senator from Nebraska has elected to get out of town.

Good.

I’m not under any illusions that he’s going to be replaced with anything but the worst sort of Confederate redneck, given that Nebraska is basically Alabama with wheat.  But the fact of the matter is that in the US Senate, if you don’t have 60 votes, it doesn’t much matter whether you have 51 or 59.  The only thing Nelson has brought to the table for years is ideological cover for right-wingers who want to cry “bipartisan opposition!” for their scorched-earth campaign against the Obama administration.  So if you’re actively taking things off the table, you should pretty much get to miss dessert.

So long.  Fuck ‘im.  As long as we keep 51, we’ll be fine, because don’t think for a second that the GOP is going to keep the filibuster around once they hit a bare majority in the Senate.  We could have solved this already – and done a lot more for the country – if Harry Reid had any balls at all, but instead he allowed the Senate to be led around by the likes of Ben Nelson.

Makes you wish Nancy Pelosi was a Senator.

When we box up all the S we didn’t want and try to get money for it.  OK, I know that’s not what Boxing Day technically is, but bear with me, because I’m boxing up some Christmas songs to send back for good, hopefully.

I have no idea why, but I’m really tired of “Everybody’s Waiting For The Man With The Bag.”  Cheesy, hokey, and reminds me too much of those mother-!-ing Lexus “December To Remember” ads.  If anybody gets me a Lexus for Christmas, I’m returning that shit on the 26th.  You better be paying straight cash for that Lexus.  I don’t need a gift that comes with a monthly note.

I’m also done with “This Christmas,” which has that soulful 70s feel to it and seems specifically engineered to induce either proposal or raging guilt in all those guys who haven’t popped the question yet.  It also gets stuck on the trailer of every holiday rom-com on Earth (thanks for nothing Richard Curtis, now everybody who can get twenty actors in a room thinks they can remake Love Actually every year).

And then there’s “Here Comes Santa Claus,” a song which undertakes the uncomfortable task of trying to mash up the Santa Claus story with the actual Jesus bit of Christmas. Awk-ward.

Actually, let me here drop my Top Five Christmas Songs That Never Mention Christmas, Jesus, Santa Claus Or Even Bloody DECEMBER In The Course Of The Song:

5) “Winter Wonderland.”  Seriously, if they can pop the song out just fine when it snows in February, it’s not much of a Christmas song, is it?  And that was before all the Ricky Hatton fans started walking around the MGM Grand singing “There’s only one Ricky Hatton, there’s only one Ricky Hatton, a beautiful sight we’re happy tonight walking in a Hatton wonderland” right before he got his ass knocked out by Mayweather or whoever it was.

4) “Let It Snow.”  Similar.  Hell, it was written on a scorching August day in 1945 and released as a plea for colder weather, not anything Christmassy.  Nice tune but nothing ties it to the holiday except for the generic theme of “Ooh Winter Look.”

3) “Sleigh Ride.” I could go the rest of my life without hearing the Boston Pops version – IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE LYRICS.  And the versions that do have lyrics reference that there’ll be a BIRTHDAY party, not even a Christmas party.  OK, the Debbie Gibson version gets a pass because of happy memories of Christmas at Vanderbilt and yelling “pass around the coffee and the SWEET POTATO PIE” but in all other respects, again, NOT a Christmas song.

2) “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”  Hoo boy.  This one has come in for quite a beating the last couple of years, and no wonder – on the face of it, the best you can say for it is that it’s kind of creepy, and at worst, the only way not to make it sound like something out of a terrible Lifetime movie is to gender-swap it (a la the She & Him version or last year’s Gap ad with Selma Blair and Rainn Wilson) or do some other twist (like the Glee version).  In any event, again – all it’s got going for it is snow and cold.  Yet it gets hammered to death this time of year.  But nothing more than…

1) “Jingle Bells.”  Yes, go through it, there is NOTHING IN JINGLE BELLS THAT REFERENCES CHRISTMAS.  It’s a song about having a fast horse and a fast sleigh and picking up girls.  And the author intended it to be a THANKSGIVING song.  The most Christmassy of Christmas songs growing up, and there’s not a lick of Christmas to it.

There.  Done.  Now that we’ve punted eight songs from the canon, let’s see if we can find five good ones next year that don’t get nearly enough run…

Too long since I was here last. Long enough that I’ve not checked in here on Foursquare ever. Nothing fancy in the order – fish and chips with a pint of Newcastle, just like four years ago. Dim lighting, red velvet furnishings (with wallpaper to match), it looks and feels and even smells like an upper class English pub built to purpose and then disassembled to relocate to Silicon Valley. Which is exactly what happened. Always sparsely populated whenever I’ve been here, quiet and secluded – a perfect getaway. Hopefully it doesn’t lose that character when the Apple Death Star rises across the street on the new campus.

In a highly ironic and appropriate twist, Samsung has chosen Festivus – the day of the Airing of Grievances – to put out the word that Ice Cream Sandwich, the Android 4.0 release, will not be made available for the Samsung Galaxy S line, nor for the original (pre-Honeycomb) Galaxy Tab.  Why? According to Samsung’s statement as reported by The Verge, “The company’s argument is that they lack sufficient RAM and ROM to run the new OS alongside TouchWiz and other ‘experience-enhancing’ software.”

The Galaxy S first dropped in 2010, in March.  So with three months to go, the first adopters have officially been end-of-lifed on OS upgrades, because in a choice between the latest version of the OS and their own proprietary UI gimmick, Samsung has chosen the gimmick.

Say what you like about Apple, but when you buy an iPhone, you know (based on four years’ results so far) that you will get full upgrades to the OS for the life of the phone’s 2-year contract.  The original iPhone got the update to iOS 2 (inasmuch as its hardware could support it; obviously GPS and 3G didn’t come with) and the iPhone 3GS got updated to iOS 4 without a fight.  Beyond that, there’s even support for iOS 5, so if your iPhone is over two years old, you still get some of the new functionality.

This isn’t necessary.  Maybe in the early days of Android it made sense to slap your own UI on there, but Ice Cream Sandwich in its pure form (inasmuch as such can be had) is generally regarded as the best Android yet and doesn’t need to be tweaked up by OEMs.  Nevertheless, Samsung has made their call.  The real issues is that Samsung isn’t party to the notional Android upgrade agreement from a few months back…not that it helps, as that deal is allegedly for May 2001 and forward.  So if you bought your Android phone before this summer, it’s best to assume that you already have the newest version of the OS you’ll ever get.

Barring rooting and hacking, of course, and the usual suspects will sarcastically post compile commands and point out how open Android is so all you have to do is apply a custom build of the OS and you’re fine.  And the overwhelming non-geek majority of phone consumers will throw their hands in the air and line up for an iPhone, because at least you can be confident that you’ll get the full two years’ support for it.

Resolutions for 2011:

 

1) To take better care of my teeth and my hair, as I am running perilously short of both

Eh.  This sort of happened.  Needs to happen more.  Mainly I need to start flossing religiously and also put a better brush on the Sonicare.

 

2) To exercise beyond just letting the personal trainer torture me once a week

This kind of sort of happened but not really.  We quit the trainer after a while, but we did run a 5K on two separate occasions this year and did more regular walk/run work than has been done in ages.  I’m ticketed to join the Y after first of the year, both to facilitate cold-weather running (treadmill, aka the Horse Dyno, FTW) and to force me to do *some* weights.  The notion that I would exercise at work was a noble one, but logistically impossible to make happen regularly.

 

3) To make a better effort to find the free coffee on campus

Varying degrees of success.  Although one business unit I support did splash out for the Keurig this year.  More helpful was getting into the groove of filling the coffee thermos before heading out the door in the morning, something I intend to do more of in 2012.  Note to self: buy new GoodGrips 14 oz mug for Christmas.  Metal one.

 

4) To kick the white peppermint mocha addiction

Done.  Too sweet and too pricey.  An indulgence for Christmas only, and only because I’ve basically punted life until January 3. =)

 

5) This is a big one, maybe the biggest, because I haven’t made any real effort toward it that wasn’t tied in with trying to hide from dysfunctional relatives: I will unplug one night a week.

Done.  Amazingly, this actually happened.  There were times when I might cheat and glance at Twitter or look up the URL of a band while out, but almost across the board, Tuesday night in 2011 meant that the laptop stayed shut, the phone stayed on the bedside table, and I packed nothing more electronically capable than a MOTOFONE F3 and a Kindle with the wireless off.  I’ve done some reading, I’ve watched some TV, I’ve hung out with people, and I’ve basically taken advantage of the forced disconnect to help center myself and let go of the world for a bit.  This was the best resolution of the year and one that paid dividends in a big way.

 

Now, for 2012…we’ll see what I come up with.

Sic transit Newt. After a surprising second act in the GOP primary race, the ground seems to have opened up beneath the self-styled historian. A barrage of negative ads in Iowa has not helped the man who today got called a “fucking asshole” to his face by one irate camo-clad Hawkeye, and his inexplicable sabbatical (and ensuing desertion by almost the entire staff) have left him without the resources to fight beyond whatever free media he can scrape up – especially in the face of a conservative establishment rising as one to reject him.

Which is truly ironic. Because the modern GOP is the party of Newt. His plan to become Prime Minister of the United States was predicated on a Confederate takeover of the GOP – not just in terms of elected members of Congress, but in personality and campaign style. Redneck populism with a racial edge has been the Republican stock in trade for two decades now, and its origins – especially for the GOP as a Congressional entity – can be laid at the feet of Gingrich.

Like Frankenstein, though, his monster has run out from under him. The Tea Party now runs the GOP in the House, and it has forced the hand of John Boehner – as weak a Speaker as Gingrich was strong in the mid-90s – so that the House GOP is now on record as de facto rejecting a payroll tax break for ordinary working Americans that mustered a mere 89% support in the Senate. Because the most vital consideration for the modern GOP is to oppose – regardless of merit or consequence. The same scorched-earth approach that Gingrich brought to the table in the Clinton years is now the only way of doing business, and it has led to a Washington environment in which merely keeping the lights on is a Herculean task.

So it’s quite fitting that the future of the GOP has been perched on the Newt precipice these last couple of weeks. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore, and that day is coming for the Republicans. Meanwhile, the odds are growing that Ron Paul may be the last man on the anyone-but-Romney-go-round, which may finally get him the airing his devotees have demanded for years now. Be careful what you wish for.

If nothing else, one thing stands out for Barack Obama: he has always had providential fortune in his choice of opponents.

 

Dec. 26, 2005…

Well that was interesting.

I’ve just gone through a time warp. I have spent the better part of the last five hours digging through a footlocker stuffed full of my old paperwork, from junior-high to the middle of Vanderbilt – in short, everything between “hey, girls are interesting” and “subscribe LISTSERV”. I generated two huge trash bags and most of a good-sized box, parsing into “keep this” and “trash that,” although half of the stuff to keep should probably actually be trashed. If any of you are Doctor Who fans, I think I may have just finished regenerating.

It’s a very surreal experience, knowing that all this stuff is at least ten years old and probably more like fifteen, but what’s more surreal is the way that I had that big needle-scratch in my mind when the wife came into the room and I realized that it wasn’t actually 1988, or 1993, or…

In high school, you always think you’re all alone, that you’re special and misunderstood and whatever. The really disappointing thing is realizing that you were just exactly like everybody else….

Dec. 27, 2005…

…the process of weeding out the cruft of half a life ago (literally, this coming spring, half a life ago) has done some really weird things to my psyche. All I can say is that I am clearly not the man I was, and not just the way that Christopher Eccleston is not Jon Pertwee. If you track back to 1988-90, I have gotten almost everything I ever wanted – granted, it took a hell of a long time, and a lot of what I got was not what I expected, and I have since lost some of what I got, and a couple of the things I just grew out of needing. But for better or worse, here I am. I don’t even have anything I wanted for Christmas and didn’t get.

God willing, maybe this means that some of my thought-processes and reflexes and instincts that were wet-wired back in the dark days of adolescence will go away now, or at least grow up. I’m not counting on it, though. I’d settle for just being able to make the mortgage on time and for my car lasting one more year…

There once was a time in the mid-90s when I watched Sportscenter with the obsessive daily fixation I’d had for the nightly news in junior high and high school.  Famously, I arrived for my second year of grad school to turn on the TV, set it for ESPN, flip to ESPN2, and proceed to go the whole term without touching any buttons but volume, mute, and previous-channel – including the power button.

Back then, ESPN was just making the leap into mass consciousness.  ABC still hadn’t quite been acquired by Disney (that came in 1996) and the whole “espn2” project was still seen as a bit fringe-y, and a lot of the personalities were the same ones who had been around for most of the 80s – happy hour with Charley Steiner and Robin Roberts, or the big show with Olbermann and Patrick (still one of the best television programs ever, never mind sportscasting or even newscasting).

The problem is that ESPN was too good at what it did.  It went from being the Worldwide Leader In Sports to the 800 lb gorilla, especially in areas where it was the predominant carrier of the sport – college.  ESPN made college basketball a national obsession in the 1980s and 90s because it was finally possible to see a lot of games with a lot of teams in a lot of areas – and they televised NIT and early-round NCAA action to boot.  ESPN showed four college games on Saturdays – usually more than you could see on all the over-the-air stations combined.  And ESPN’s influence grew out of all proportion once it essentially ate ABC Sports, heretofore the primary purveyor of college football in the fall.

Now, the track record speaks for itself.  Half a dozen channels, a magazine, a huge web presence, a string of restaurants for crying out loud – ESPN is too big for its britches.  It singlehandedly shattered the notion of bias against west coast teams when it pimped USC for three years as “possibly the greatest team of all time” when they won a total of one (1) national championship along the way.  It treated Brett Favre as bigger than the Green Bay Packers, beating the drum incessantly for him as The! Greatest! Toughest! Gunslinger! Quarterback! Ever! even when his last three teams finished their season with him throwing a pick that lost the game and eliminated them from postseason play. It essentially reduced major league baseball to the Yankees vs the Red Sox.  It enabled the greatest feat of NBA narcissism on record with “The Decision” and hyped the results to the stars with a year of the “Heat Index,” only for Lebron James to choke in the playoffs. And its latest project, Tim Tebow, the best-throwing wildcat fullback in the NFL today, got a whopping 88 mentions in one hour of Sportscenter last week.

Most important for our purposes, though, is the way ESPN precipitated the realignment of college sports with its operation of the Longhorn Network, giving a university its own private cable network for the first time ever (not even BYU, with its LDS-provided satellite coverage in years gone by, had 24-hour run of the service).  Its ownership stake in almost every minor bowl and broadcast rights for the BCS mean that it essentially controls college football’s postseason – indeed, it administers the coaches’ poll that is itself a third of the BCS calculation.  And most infamously, one of its on-air personalities essentially used the network as a platform to provoke the firing of his son’s college coach.  (At least it was a break from covering up the five hookers he killed at SMU back in the day.)

ESPN has essentially arrogated to itself the right not just to cover sports, but to order the pieces on the board to its own satisfaction and promote the ones of its choosing.  Not for nothing does it backbone the “SEC Network” that puts every single SEC football game on some ESPN outlet (even if Vanderbilt seems only to rate ESPN3 most weeks) when the SEC is looking at a sixth consecutive BCS football championship.

Maybe Fox Sports will make a dent with its half-dozen Pac-12 networks, the B1G network, and the electrifying tones of Gus Johnson.  Maybe the transition of Versus to the NBC Sports Network (in conjunction with NBCU’s Comcast SportsNet offerings) will enable a third party in the cable sports marketplace.  But right now, ESPN has a monopolistic level of influence on the world of college athletics, and the collegiate sports realm is the poorer for it.

I want to see this game in person before I die. It’s fitting that it gets pride of place as the last regular season game, because it is the apotheosis, the Platonic ideal, of what college football is: a bunch of guys playing their hearts out with no eye toward the NFL, all students and athletes with no redshirts or easy majors, in a rivalry that really will make the whole season worth it.

I haven’t had a lot to say about Cal football this year, because it’s been such a weird season.  Five stadiums in the first five games. Home games at AT&T Park, which is singularly unsuited for full-time football with one side of the stadium sending all its noise into the bay. A major shift in offense with the return of much of the old staff (we’re getting the band back together!) and the sea change in quarterbacking.  In short, this is a highly anomalous and outlying year for Cal football, and it’s felt strange from day one.

But to cap it all off, the gods of football have thrown one last wrench into the machine –  the bowl game.  Because the Pac-12 finally has two teams in the BCS, because the automatic bowl tie-ins were rearranged with the addition of the Alamo Bowl to the lineup, and because USC is ineligible for postseason play, the stars have somehow aligned to send Cal to San Diego for the Holiday Bowl, site of the infamous 2004 flameout.  And their opponent is none other than the team that effectively took their Rose Bowl berth: the Texas Longhorns.

To recap: Mack Brown basically attempted to beg the Longhorns into a BCS bowl, largely because his own job was in jeopardy after yet another loss to Oklahoma.  Enough writers and poll voters shifted their votes to put Texas at #4 in the BCS rankings and drop Cal to #5.  Because Utah – a non-BCS-conference team – came in at #6, the rules guaranteed them a BCS at-large berth, and because Texas was in the top 4 of the overall BCS rankings, the rules guaranteed them a BCS berth, and because USC was the champion of the Pac-10 and recipient of the automatic bid, that left Cal with no room at the inn, and that’s how the #4 team in both “human”* polls wound up in the Holiday Bowl against Texas Tech, who had themselves been bumped one spot up in the bowl system by the promotion of two Big-12 teams to the BCS bowls.**

And Cal lost.  The explanations are plentiful – some will point to the amazing power of Mike Leach’s infamous “Air Raid” offense and the 500+ yards of passing that night; others will point out how Cal was down to one starting receiver by December and yet still insisted on passing the ball to try to catch up quick through the second and third quarters.  My explanation has always been straightforward: Jeff Tedford is simply not the kind of coach who can rally a team from an emotional blow.  Look at the post-Big Game losses to Washington in 2009-10, or the slow collapse of 2007 – once the shoulders slump and the heads begin to hang, the odds that Tedford will rally the troops to fight back vary from slim to nonexistent.  And since the Holiday Bowl was the last place on Earth that the Golden Bears wanted to be, they played like it – with predictable results.

But for whatever reason, it happened. And Texas went on to a one-point win in the Rose Bowl followed by a national championship against USC in the very same Rose Bowl the following year.  Meanwhile, Aaron Rodgers turned pro, Nate Longshore had a season-ending injury in 2005 and a season-destroying injury in 2007, DeSean Jackson was ruled out of bounds against Arizona in 2006, USC payrolled their way to half a dozen consecutive Pac-10 titles and auto-BCS bids, and the Cal era finally crested in a Holiday Bowl obliteration of Texas A&M in 2006 and demolition of Tennessee in the 2007 opener before…well… with apologies to HST…

Strange memories to come on that nervous night in San Diego. Five years later? Seven? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. Cal football in the middle 2000s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run …but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant …

History is hard to know, because of all the BCS bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole football program comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe a dozen evenings—or very late afternoons—when I left Memorial half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the Jetta across the Bay Bridge at twenty miles an hour wearing blue Oakleys and a a short-sleeve Cal rugby …booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of San Francisco, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too jittery to find the goddamn EZ-Pass in the glovebox) … but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where Golden Bear fans were just as crazy and excited as I was: No doubt at all about that …

There was madness in any direction, every week. If not in Berkeley, then up in Oregon or down 101 to Palo Alto or in Arizona …. You could get wins anywhere. (Except Los Angeles.) There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the excitement—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Bad History and Inevitability and the Pac-10. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our Bears would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ….

So now, about five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Berkeley and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back…

 

As I alternately sulked and raged that night in San Diego, my wife told me “Well, now you’re officially a Cal fan.”  I had only come on board with Tedford in 2002, so I was there for the rocket ride up – but I think I knew at some level that we had lost something that doesn’t come around that often, something that may not come back around for a while – if ever.  And that explains why the rage has grown unabated ever since – not just that Cal didn’t get the chance, thanks to the perfidious trio of Mack Brown, Pete Carroll and the BCS, but that we don’t know if the next chance will ever even happen, let alone in our lifetimes.  And the magnitude of what was lost grows with every passing year.

* Well, the AP at least.  A sportswriter is kind of like a human.

** It has to be added that on top of everything else, a 3-loss Pitt squad was guaranteed a BCS berth thanks to the inexplicable decision that the Big East somehow rated an automatic bid.  Even if it were justifiable then, it’s absolutely risible now with five Big East football teams (including the aforementioned Pitt) having decamped for the ACC.  Conference titles are nice, but having a situation where a team like Pitt in 2004 or UConn in 2010 can somehow land a seat on the starship only makes me think that there shouldn’t be any automatic BCS berth for any conference winner and that the final top 10 teams should get the goodies irrespective of conference.  That would go over like a fart in church outside the SEC, although I suspect after the last decade Oregon might be on board…