Author: Stagger Lee

How is it that Stanford can be ranked #6 in the country, sitting on 10 wins and possibly looking at the Rose Bowl, and Vanderbilt can’t see the far side of .500 more than once in a quarter-century? Everything else is competitive – both basketball teams and the baseball are annual postseason contenders and always competitive with the best in the country – so why the FUCK can’t football get over the goddamn hump?

Southern Methodist University was the worst offender in a conference full of them. in the days of the Pony Express, they were laboring under their seventh stint of NCAA probation, when an intrepid investigation by the local television sports crew unearthed a long-running slush fund for payment of players. Exasperated at last, the NCAA handed SMU a ban on football for 1987 and a limit of 7 games in 1988 (all on the road, to fulfill conference obligations). It’s the only time the NCAA has ever shut down an entire football program at a member institution.

SMU chose to leave the program shut down in 1988 rather than play only on the road, and set about retooling their athletic department, but the damage was done. The program has never been the same, and the entire Southwest Conference broke up in the realignment of the early 1990s – some schools to the Big XII (itself now coming apart), some to the WAC, one to the SEC. This kind of ripple effect is probably the reason why nobody’s gotten the death penalty since, and probably the reason Miami wound up skating on its Pell Grant scandal in the early 90s.

Instead, the NCAA goes for the neutron bomb approach – kill all the people but leave the structures standing. That’s what Alabama caught in the early 2000s – and the justice of that penalty, with no finding of lack of institutional control and no finding of culpability on the past of any university employee, is still up for debate – and it’s what USC caught this year. Take away postseason play and a critical mass of scholarships, and you can devastate a program for the better part of a decade. For the Tide or Trojans, of course, there’s always a chance to come back, as Nick Saban demonstrated – the great powers usually have the means to recover.

The reason this is interesting now is because of Tennessee. The men’s basketball coach got an unprecedented half-season suspension from conference play from the SEC office – something they have never done before – because he lied to NCAA investigators. Said investigators have not reported back, possibly because they are also dealing with the slew of violations reported under Lane Kiffin in football and rumblings around the baseball program as well.

So is Tennessee in line for the death penalty? Probably not. The official NCAA standard is “two major violations in five years” but it’s unclear whether that standard could be applied if the violations are in two separate programs. (Alabama was literally threatened with it – “looking down the barrel” was the phrase the investigating committee used – but the first of the two violations was in basketball.) It’s a little bit mind-blowing how the athletic director in Knoxville still has a job, to be honest, but maybe they’re waiting for the official letter of inquiry so they can loudly and publicly sacrifice him. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that the only chance of surviving an NCAA probe is to immediately self-immolate and throw yourself on the mercy of the committee. Standing up for yourself only gets a harder smack.

And, as is ever the case, it does very little good. Sure, USC had to vacate a ton of wins and their 2004 national championship (the only actual one of the attempted three-peat, thanks to LSU), but do any of the fans care? Does Auburn get hooked up with a title? Does Cal get a retroactive Rose Bowl berth against Michigan? Does Vince Young get Reggie Bush’s Heisman? No, no, and no. So I ask you this: if the punishment is long delayed and never as bad as the crime was good, and if Vanderbilt has an endowment pushing $3 billion, why the hell haven’t we broke out the checkbook and taken this thing as far as it can go? Sure, they can vacate all that shit in five years, but if I was there at the Sugar Bowl, I’ll know better…

There are five superheroes that anyone in America knows: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and the Hulk. The first three of those are DC Comics properties – and while the Christopher Nolan reboot of Batman has been a tremendous success and wiped the slate of those Schumacher abominations, the recent Superman revival was a dud – and let’s not even start in on the development hell of Wonder Woman. Meanwhile, across the aisle, Marvel has taken one of their second-tier properties in Iron Man and turned it into a phenomenon (largely thanks to the born-to-play-him casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark). So now DC prepares to do the same…with Green Lantern.

This is a reach, to say the least. Green Lantern isn’t even part of the regular Super Friends rotation (the aforementioned trio plus Robin and Aquaman, for those of you born after 1978 or so) – so, like Iron Man, you’re going big with a character who is largely a blank slate in the public mind. Apparently there has been more complexity and hogwash around Green Lantern in recent years than almost any other character, with a whole rainbow of alternate lanterns and some sort of zombie Black Lanterns and…oh I can’t even. One of the problems of flogging the same characters for fifty years that the accretion of previous continuity and retcons and plot devices run amuck results in the need to blow everything up and start fresh (thinking of the Ultimate Marvel line here).

So instead, we’re going down a similar road, judging by the trailer: lovable rogue suddenly finds himself in a position of great power and has to overcome his own limitations to become A Hero. We have seen this ONE MILLION times, so the success is in the details. And despite all manner of gadgetry and psychotic foes, the success of the Nolan Batman and of Iron Man – in my opinion anyway – has come from the fact that these stories are explicitly not about Batman and Iron Man, but about Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark. Hell, Iron Man is groundbreaking in that when’s the last time you saw a superhero with no secret identity in mainstream entertainment? Part of the thing about the movie version is that everyone knows Tony Stark = Iron Man, and there are issues that flow from that.

Too, Batman and Iron Man have the advantage of being guys in suits. You may have to CGI some of their shenanigans, but these are not things that are totally beyond reason. It remains to be seen how responsive non-fanboy audiences are going to be to an interstellar police force with “power rings” and green Spandex. Then again, the filmmakers have cleverly broadened their appeal by casting the newly-minted “Sexiest Man Alive” as their protagonist and helpfully put him in nothing but his drawz to open the trailer. Setting aside the question of “when the hell did the guy off ‘Two Guys A Girl And A Pizza Place’ become the Sexiest Man Alive?” it will be interesting to see whether Ryan Reynolds can walk the same tightrope that RDJ did without the advantage of being a functional alcoholic playing a functional alcoholic. (Maybe he can get an introduction, since his wife was the one spying on Tony Stark for SHIELD…)

Watch it? Of course I will. Hell, I went and saw Watchmen, didn’t I, and what a load of old shite that turned out to be…at the very least, I want to see whether it’s going to be Iron Man or Daredevil…

Yesterday, I got a message from my counterpart on Team Black Swan. As has become traditional in times of stress or novelty, he sent along a picture of the day’s chosen beverage. Unfortunately, drinking establishments being how they are, it wasn’t too too light in there…

So I saved the picture out of MMS into my camera roll on the phone, fired up Photoshop Express, upped the exposure and ran a couple of sharpening filters, and tweaked the contrast ever so slightly…and got this:

Great picture? No. Able to clearly distinguish the straight whiskey with a beer? Absolutely. And I did all this with nothing but the very phone I received the message on. The same phone that I’ve blog-posted from before. The same phone that lets me video-chat from my phone to my wife’s computer. The same phone on which I see real-time updates of things happening right around me, whether it’s a parade or a Cal game or a night out at Singlebarrel – my friends can see what I’m doing and respond to it in real time from anywhere in the country.

I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again: when I was in first grade, the big thing was to fold up a piece of paper into a long strip which then got folded over three times and decorated heavily in number-2 pencil. On one side, when folded up, it was a badge with “Lt. whatever” (the universal sci-fi rank, is Lieutenant, which I couldn’t spell in first grade). On the other side, the various phaser/blaster controls. Open it up and there was your tricorder, your scanner, your force field, your cloaking device, all the necessities for a bunch of kids with runaway imaginations in the era of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rodgers and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

It’s hard not to shake the feeling that thirty years on, all I lack is to put on a lock-screen picture of a badge that says “Lt. Donkey.”

Last night I had the strangest dream. (I did not sail away to China in a little rowboat to find ya.) I don’t know if it was to do with trying to catch up on a month’s worth of Glee (we are seriously in arrears on television, and Top Gear has gotten totally out of hand) or just a byproduct of Sunday’s trip to the theatre, but somehow, in my dream last night, a bunch of people I didn’t know and some I did were doing some sort of theatrical production. I was late, but I didn’t have any lines until the second act. And I had no idea what my lines were, but knew that it was something very natural and that with a glance at the script beforehand I’d probably be golden. And somehow we did the performance and it was a smashing success, and later that day I had to retrieve something from the crawlspace under somebody’s house, but I have no idea what that had to do with anything…and scene.

Today’s topic stems from the last trip to Disneyland, in October, when I was hanging over the rail at the Boardwalk hollering at people getting ready to be railgunned on California Screamin’. It was a beautiful day, we were having a spectacular time, everything was going great, I’d forgotten all about Vandy getting railgunned themselves by Connecticut the day before, and the thought flittered through my head, I’m in denial about how old I actually am.

I don’t feel 38-and-a-half. It feels like not that much time has gone by, even though some things feel like they took place several lifetimes ago. It doesn’t seem real that next May Day, I will have been in California as long as I was in Northern Virginia. Come Christmas, I’ll have been away from Apple as long as I was at Apple. I’ve been in my house for five years, which is the longest stretch I’ve lived at a single address since I left home for college, which was itself more than half my life ago. I remember the last week of undergrad, thinking “it can’t possibly have been more than two years. I have so much left to do.” And the kids born that week are driving now.

Sometimes I think that’s what did it – high school was my college, college was my high school, grad school was trying to make up for the college experience and I wound up landing in the real world like a 21-year-old, only at age 25. It seems like everything was in slow motion, or else took forever. Hell, I wasn’t married until I was 33, and that was after four years in the relationship. Mentally, I’m still wired like a college student. Late nights and later mornings. Wall-to-wall college basketball. I want to stay up for 1 AM tipoffs at the holidays and yell like hell. I want to have a Nerf gun in my bag in case one of the zombies makes a move for me on the way to the cafeteria. I want to drop by random friends’ places and hang out after class work. I sign up for things like Foursquare and Twitter, knowing full well that the key utility in them is not for people like me – I’m not going to look and see “hey, my friends are hanging out at Tied House, I should go” or check in myself at the Saint knowing that somebody will probably pop in eventually. For crying out loud, I actually volunteered to be part of somebody’s adult show choir…that is, until they got distracted with a full-scale theatrical production that they may be moving to SF or LA.

And I’d really like to sign up for the junior year abroad program – except I don’t think my employer has one for IT staff.

I wonder if this refusal to come to grips with how old I actually am is what they mean by “midlife crisis” – probably, except I don’t have any impulse to go get hair plugs and a motorcycle and start macking on girls half my age. I’m not out to recapture my youth as such, I just wish I’d gotten a full youth’s worth out of it. Maybe I did, and I just don’t know what’s average or normal, but somehow it never quite feels that way.

Last week I had a rough time, owing to somebody else’s personal business that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say it was the sort of thing that made me want to cocoon in a big way – I wanted to unplug the phone, shut off the email, and just get away for a bit.

And I realized, I can do exactly that.

I had a miniature 12-year-Dewar’s left over from a Christmas present a couple years ago from my surrogate big sister. I have a Sodastream machine capable of creating my own fizzy water 24 ounces at a time. I have a nice rugged polycarbonate double-old-fashioned rocks glass, and I have a fridge that makes ice. I don’t know what inspired me to pull it all together, but I had a fleeting memory of the McTeggarts, who would occasionally play a song they introduced as “a favorite of all the boys in the back, so we’ll play this one for them,” and play the old Kingston Trio tune “Scotch and Soda.”

And I sat on the couch, sipped my drink, watched some of the backed-up episodes on the DVR, and just breathed deeply. And it was phenomenal.

A while back, another blogger of my acquaintance embarked on a program by which she would do one night a week unplugged. The more I think about this, the more I’m inclined to try it myself. I have a couple of thoughts on how it would work for me, though, because my problem is that I will invariably hitting refresh on Twitter, on Facebook, on my RSS reader, lather rinse repeat. And I don’t need to just keep running laps around the same four apps on the iPhone or laptop.

So, my thoughts on how this would go:

* No laptop. Or desktop, for that matter.

* No iPhone. I could pull out the backup phone solely as a lifeline for planning or in case the wife needed to reach me if I’m out, but I’m not really accepting incoming calls. (Let’s face it, anyone who knows me knows the best move is to text me anyway.)

* No iPad – I don’t even own this one – but I’m wondering whether to caveat that for use of the Kindle app (or even an actual Kindle) for reasons below.

* No TV, at least not as a crutch for background noise. If I’m going to watch something I should bloody well watch it.

So what do I hope to accomplish by this?

* More reading. As it is, the magazines, and there aren’t many, tend to pile up for a while. I want to avoid that – actual words on a printed page will force me to perhaps slow down, skim less, actually try for some comprehension. Books as well – I’m currently re-reading some stuff, but I may want to branch out and read new material soon, and for that I want to allow an electronic loophole as Kindle-based reading is both cheaper and easier to transport.

* Movies. The wife and I do not see movies. This is a problem. I have lost count of all the things we need to see and haven’t – we still haven’t seen Up, for crying out loud, never mind Toy Story 3 or the new Harry Potter or Red or Date Night or Scott Pilgrim vs the World or any number of things. We’re working on an upgraded internet connection, we’re probably going to have AppleTV to go with the DirecTV box, there’s Netflix, we’ll have any number of ways to get movie content in front of us – there’s no excuse at this point.

* Going out and about. Picking Wednesday means that I start the evening in Menlo Park, which will make it easy to hop on Caltrain to visit people who live further up the Peninsula – or to go all the way into the city if need be. It also puts Iberia back on the grid, which can get expensive but has leather chairs with an actual wood-burning fireplace and sangria that’s less sangria and more Gibraltar Island Iced Tea. Or the British Bankers Club, which can douche up from time to time but also has perhaps the finest cocktail menu in 650. Or perhaps south, all the way to San Jose and Singlebarrel or Trials or O’Flaherty’s – or even just to the Cuban place on Cal Ave which is halfway home anyway.

* Exercise. STOP LAUGHING IT IS NOT A JOKE.

Basically, I’m just hoping to get off the Internet treadmill for one night a week and see if it helps ratchet my brain down a little. And hell, if I’m going to drink like an old man, I may as well try to live like one…

Six months after flooding made a mess of Nashville, the Opryland Hotel is opening for business again just in time for Christmas. And not a moment too soon, as Christmas is half the reason for going by the Opryland Hotel. The sea of lights and poinsettias is the Platonic ideal of what you’d expect from Christmas in Nash Vegas.

My first trip there was in 1993, on a long drive up with my then-girlfriend in the earlier days of the relationship, when I could write her off as “stressed” rather than “certifiable psychopath”. We drove up and back in a day just so we could drive through the lights, park, walk around, snicker at the CD offerings for the piano player in the Cascades who was evidently aping Yanni. For whatever reason, I was utterly taken with the place.

The Opryland Hotel is huge. I mean, frickin’ enormous. Opryland no longer exists as a theme park, but the hotel persists because its Death Star proportions make it ideal for convention business, especially with things like water taxis to downtown and the Sucker District up the Cumberland River, or showboat cruises on the General Jackson, or proximity to the Grand Ole Opry (for a long time, the studios of WSM-AM were right in the hotel). There’s a huge greenhouse of a thing with waterfalls and trees everywhere and a couple of restaurants, which is the aforementioned Cascades, and another one called the Conservatory which is even longer and full of paths, walkways, balconies – basically it’s the greatest Quake map in the world waiting to happen. And further back in the hotel, there are half a dozen assorted bars and restaurants, everything from a quasi-Irish pub to the obligatory Gone With The Wind-themed steakhouse. To cap it all off, they opened an expansion my last year in Nashville which they called the Delta, bigger than the Cascades and Conservatory combined, with an island in the middle full of shops and restaurants and a river around it big enough to offer flatboat rides on. All indoors. It’s basically a Vegas hotel without the hassle and inconvenience of actual gaming.

For three years in grad school, it was the best off-campus getaway I could muster. Drive over to Briley Parkway, stash the car, walk in, pop on the Walkman headphones, and just walk around in an atmosphere that called to mind nothing so much as all those Disney trips staying in the Contemporary Resort Hotel. Only greener and slightly twangier. It was at one of their brunch offerings where I first encountered creme brulee, and we all know how that turned out.

I didn’t go back for a while after leaving Nashville – the only way I got into town was on day trips up from home during holidays, and that left little time beyond just hitting Vanderbilt’s bookstore and maybe a spin through the West End – but at Christmas 2003, the then-girlfriend-now-wife and I drove up to Nashville, saw campus, saw Green Hills, drove over to the Opryland Hotel, and actually stayed the night at her insistence. And I was very glad she insisted – it gave us all the time in the world to stroll around, see all the sights, ride in the boat, drink in the pub, and experience a little bit of that escape from everything.

And even though I’ve spent time out here at the St. Francis Hotel, or the Ahwanee, or the Ritz-Carlton – for some reason, they’re just not the same.

It works on the iPad. Wonder how well it flies on the phone?

Not bad in landscape mode. Might want that Bluetooth keyboard. Don’t know if I would want to pound out 500 words at a time on this trick. Maybe time to invoke Dragon Dictation?

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

We first went there in January 2000. The Y2K project had obviously come to an end, it was January, and at my workplace in DC, January inevitably meant the mass layoff of IT contractors. Everyone from the NCO-level down knew damn well that we’d have to hire contractors again by May, but the management had head-in-ass disease on matters of staffing that were never fully cured.

So for our parting drinks, we headed up to Cleveland Park to an Irish establishment recommended by the off-the-boat Irish contractor. We arrived at 6 PM that Friday night, saw posted bills for live music that evening, and decided to stick around. There was the best pint of Guinness I’d ever had (and one that firmly clinched the black stuff as my chosen beverage), there was soup that tasted like pure liquid potato, there was chicken in a Tullamore Dew cream sauce and a ground beef-on-hasbrowns thing made with more Guinness, and awesome bread pudding.

And around 9, the two fellows with the guitars took their seats on the tiny stage. I think the first thing they played was “The Liffey Ferry,” and at its conclusion announced “Hallo, good evening, we are the McTeggarts, we come from the south of Ireland…” And they lit into the Black Velvet Band and the Wild Rover and we all had to clap along, and the Irish Rover, and our man Tom kept explaining where to clap and where to yell, and they just kept bringing Guinness, and through an inebriate haze around midnight, I heard “The Fields of Athenry” for the first time.

Long story short: we left at 2 AM when the bar closed. The next night, we all posted at 6 PM, and we stayed until 2 AM again. And we were hooked. Well, I was, anyway. For the next four and a half years, almost everything of any consequence in my life would be celebrated in Ireland’s Four Provinces, up on Connecticut Avenue just down the block from the Uptown theater. And for a long time, McTeggarts week was a regular stop.

When I started dating the woman who I married, the 4P’s was our first stop the second time she came to visit. I wasn’t about to make it the actual Valentine’s Day dinner, but it was the pregame the night before so she could see the lads and hear the music and see what she was in for. It hosted five straight birthday parties for me – the first featuring a band called the Fenians, from Orange County (oh irony) California, which is the night I first heard “On the One Road.” That’s also the night that Tom had me try Jameson’s and Bushmill’s for comparative purpose. He was Catholic but allowed that “that other crowd” had the edge in whiskey, and it proved true. The Jameson made me think “I can whup any man in this house!” but the Bushmills made me think “I can whup EVERY man in this house!”

I was there for World Series games, election nights, NCAA tournament games. Anything worth celebrating was worth celebrating there. It’s where I had my own going-away do in 2004, and it’s where we went back to visit almost every trip to DC since. It’s the pub we closed back in March, six years after leaving town. It’s not quite the same, but it still feels like home.

The McTeggarts don’t come down anymore – they are based in the suburbs of Boston, and it’s too far to make the trek anymore now that they don’t have the second week in DC at Falls Church anymore. But I have all three of their albums on the iPhone at all times – along with two from Ronan Kavanaugh, a couple from the Fenians, and some assorted others – and it’s when I hear those songs that I miss the pub the most. Turn up the music, sip the Guinness, close your eyes – and suddenly it’s an icy February dusk with snow on the ground, pipe smoke in the air, ordering another round and craning the neck toward the door where the friends will be trickling in until the front table is full…if they have Valhalla for old EUS, that’s what it looks like.

Comes now Lou Holtz of ESPN, moaning how sad it would be if Boise State wound up having to play in the Fiesta Bowl. Now, I realize that ESPN has been in the tank for the Broncos for a couple of years now, but seriously: shut the fuck up. Was it fair when an undefeated Auburn team got jobbed out of the national title picture in favor of Chokelahoma in 2004? Or when a Cal team ranked #4 in the country, with their only loss to #1 USC, wound up in the Holiday Bowl so that Pitt and Utah could get automatic bids? Or when Oregon got left out of the 2001 title game – in the Rose Bowl no less – so that a Nebraska team that didn’t even win its conference title game could be sacrificed to Miami? And what, for crying out loud, about TCU – which has matched Boise State’s performance against superior opposition for the last 3 years?

Life isn’t fair. And Boise has gotten hype and privilege far above and beyond teams with better resumes (how many mid-majors get fully half their games on ESPN?) – if you’re in a BCS bowl, enjoy it. Relish it. Because when Boise finally gets a national title bid against somebody oher than Chokelahoma, it’s not going to be pretty.