* Well, if you didn’t believe it before, doubt me no longer: the number-one crime in the NFL is failure to acknowledge Roger Goodell’s big swinging dick. That’s why New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton will be sitting out 2012, why defensive coordinator (and bounty-program mastermind) Gregg Williams is indefinitely banned from the game, why other key figures (including the GM!) are suspended for part of the season, why they’re being docked two 2nd round picks and $500,000. Obviously they had some sort of punishment coming, but this kind of pocket nuke is basically the NFL’s Cartman commish saying “RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!”
* Redskins fans: “I KNOW THAT FEEL BRO.”
* The iPad continues to be a constant companion. Even thrown in the bag with the work laptop, it only adds a pound and a half – the iPad and MBA together are still lighter than the old 15″ MacBook Pro – and I still haven’t felt the need to turn on the 4G data (though I will probably test it this weekend).
* Shocker: a processor-intensive system runs warm. Consumer Reports has less than zero credibility on technical issues at this point, and no wonder: bigger battery, larger screen, more powerful graphics processors and CPU running at full throttle? Warmth, genius. Make sure you’re qualified before you start second-guessing.
* Haven’t been keeping close tabs on this case in Florida where the kid got shot by some neighborhood watch wannabe, but it seems to me to be concrete proof of what I’ve always said: the problem with guns isn’t the gun, nor it is the person with the gun, nor it is even with the person who needs the gun. The problem with guns is the person who wants to need the gun, because if you want to need something, you’ll make a reason to need it. Which is how that poor kid ends up shot.
* Speaking of a different kind of shot, Vanderbilt’s leading returning scorer from this year is Kedren Johnson, the presumptive starting point guard. He averaged 3.1 points per game this season. If John Jenkins goes, the Dores will return something like 12% of their scoring from this season. There’s a MUCH longer post about this in the offing.
* MANIACAL LAUGHTER. That’s the only way to greet the news that Tim Tebow has been traded to the Gomorrah Jets. The incumbent QB is a herpes-circuit club boy and the head coach has been in amateur foot-fetish porn. I see no possible way this can end badly.
* Satan Manning to the Broncos is about what you’d expect. John Elway gets his big white pocket passer, Manning gets to play behind the dirtiest line in football (which should help with protection; they never seem to call the cut block more than 4500 feet above sea level) and the whole shit and caboodle is one hard hit to the neck away from ending in tears. One wag on Twitter compared it to unloading a Zune for a refurbished iPad, and I find no fault with that analogy.
* Lest we forget, Tim Tebow’s completion percentage last year was 34th among starting NFL quarterbacks. There are 32 NFL teams. That’s bad arithmetic.
* Almost time to head East for the biannual meet-and-greet with the boys of the old brigade. This time fraught with the added emotion of last call for the 4Ps. It’s going to be very difficult not to have a complete meltdown Saturday night – I will just have to convince myself that something else will happen, that there’ll be some kind of eleventh-hour rescue again, that it’s not the last time for real. Because if I know for sure that this is the end…it’ll be like going up to see someone on their death bed and knowing it’s the last time. For once, there had better be pictures.
* Twitter is six years old today. That would make it…what, 2006? I don’t think I was on until 2007, which is odd – I seem to remember having it while I was in my first office at Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit, although I suppose I could be thinking of Dodgeball. It definitely took a while before there was any kind of critical mass to using it, for sure – but I had created a second account within six months of the first. In the end, Twitter has displaced almost every other form of social networking for me – I never touch Google+ and rarely see Facebook, and I actively avoid both where possible, but Twitter even displaced the social aspect of EDSBS and has become the focal point of the Vanderbilt fandom, and it has taken a huge chunk out of IM and texting even. And again, I think it’s down to how bloody simple Twitter is – 140 characters of text and that’s it. You can use it from the web, from your phone, your iPad, by text messaging for crying out loud – and then build atop that with the cunning use of URLs and the API. Dumb network means smarts at the ends. That’s why Twitter continues to kick the shit out of all comers.
* Vandy baseball is 7-14. By comparison, last year they only lost 12 games the entire season and only one non-conference game (the rubber match on Sunday with the Furd). My fear is that the baseball team this year presages the basketball team next year – lot of youth, lot of talent, lot of raw and a lot of learning to play as a team. I’m uneasy hanging my hopes for Vanderbilt athletics on the football program, but there you go.
* So Mike Daisey was a fabulist with regard to his tales of Apple. I guess I’m not surprised, but it’s the same old issue: when you frame a guilty man, you shouldn’t be surprised if people question his guilt (see: OJ Simpson). More irritating to me is this notion that Apple is unique in having its products screwed together in dungeons by enslaved fairies who have to glue the parts together with unicorn blood, and that somehow all other consumer electronics are licked together by adorable anime kittens. Grow up. China has only lately become the world’s manufacturer. Remember what the mills were like in New England? Or down South? Remember Upton Sinclair’s revelations about the food industry in Chicago at the turn of the century? The transition to an early-stage manufacturing economy is not a pleasant sight, and it stays unpleasant for as long as the factory owner can get away with it. I don’t like it any more than you, and I wish it were different, but that’s the price you pay for having your life based on electronic gadgets that have to be brought in at a palatable price point. Maybe we should have thought about this before we decided that it was okay to have Wal-Mart extort price concessions every year and force manufacturers to look offshore as a method of cost containment.
* I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I’m happy that my messenger bags were made only forty miles up the road. This is a good time to go back and read the fashion/manufacturing bits of the Bigend Trilogy, especially Zero History.
* Always, always, always start your out-of-office messages the day before you’re actually gone.