Are my eyes really blue?

In the early-mid-1960s, Clyde Lee was the greatest prep basketball player in Nashville. He was choosing between Vanderbilt and David Lipscomb for college, and was advised that he needed to decide whether he wanted to be a big fish in a little pond (at Lipscomb) or a little fish in a big pond (at Vanderbilt).  He chose Vanderbilt and only became the greatest player in the history of the program (barring neither Adcock, Perdue, McCaffery, Byers, Foster, Jenkins, Ezili nor Taylor). 

This came to my mind during the furore about Vanderbilt getting out of its Big Ten games next year.  We’re merely doing what the rest of the league did long ago: pull up the ladders and schedule only chum for out-of-conference games (barring rivalries OOC, something that seems to be an SEC East-only phenomenon), on the pretext that the SEC is so difficult to navigate that we don’t need anything else to improve our strength of schedule.  Personally, I question this for a team like Florida or Alabama (not to deny Alabama credit for the Saban-era practice of a marquee opponent in a neutral-site season opener), but for a team like Ole Miss or Kentucky or Vanderbilt, the notion that we’re wimping out if we don’t stack another big-ticket foe on top of three top-10 opponents in-conference doesn’t deserve the dignity of a reply, especially to programs that won’t face a ranked opponent all year.

This is the fish problem, and it’s one that Vanderbilt has struggled with in football for fifty years.  We’re a contender and a title winner in the conference in almost every other sport we play (baseball and men’s basketball both played in the conference title game last year, the hoopsters won it, and the women have multiple SECT titles on the mantle in the last decade, plus women’s cross-country won the SEC last year).  But as I’ve said before, over and over, the SEC is about exactly one thing, and it’s the one thing we as a university do worse than anything else.

The talk comes up periodically about how we should be traded to the ACC for Florida State, or Clemson, or maybe even move to the Big Ten (there was some talk about Vanderbilt as a possible 12th before Nebraska made the move) and across the board, it looks more suitable.  Better academics in both, basketball first in the ACC, the possibility of a Rose Bowl berth in the Big Ten.  And while it’s true that we’re not that good at the SEC’s one thing, is that a reason to pull out when everything else is first-class?

Maybe. But before we do, I’d say it’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to compete without compromising ourselves.  Keep going to class, keep graduating players, keep off probation, keep away from NCAA sanctions. But there’s no need to try to out-schedule everyone else, to get by on older facilities, to avoid making a play for the best recruits.  And yet it’s possible we may never grow big enough for the pond.

This is something I wrestle with myself from time to time. The single biggest mistake of my life was in where I went to undergrad. Had I left the state and been exposed to the wider world, maybe I would have grown to fit the pond. Instead, I went to a place that specialized in fitting you for a life in the small pond.  And when I finally did leave, it was with my growth stunted in a way I never really recovered from.

The question I have to ask myself is – could I have been happy as the tallest dwarf in the circus? Would I have strained against the constraints of a more circumscribed life?  And the answer is: I wasn’t. And I did.

Would Vanderbilt football be a happier place to be if we were playing in a conference of, say – Rice, SMU, Tulane, Army, Navy, and hell, maybe Wake Forest and Notre Dame? I don’t know. Is the Ivy League happy playing I-AA ball with no postseason?  Can you elect to step out of the big pond and find one just right?

Something to think about going forward. Because even though we’re going to do everything in our power to be an SEC school without compromising who we are, it occurs to me that we might not get away with this one.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

First, go check this out. It’s an article in the Sporting News last June about non-conference scheduling in BCS conferences in 2012. It’s several articles, actually; I merely linked the one pertaining to the SEC.

Finished? Good. Just to have it here where we can look at it, I’m going to paste that table in here again:

1. Missouri: Southeastern Louisiana, Arizona State, at UCF, Syracuse
2. Vanderbilt: at Northwestern, Presbyterian, UMass, at Wake Forest
3. Arkansas: Jacksonville State, at Louisiana-Monroe, Rutgers, Tulsa
4. Alabama: Michigan (at Dallas), Western Kentucky, FAU, Western Carolina
5. Florida: Bowling Green, Louisiana-Lafayette, Jacksonville State, at Florida State
6. LSU: North Texas, Washington, Idaho, Towson
7. Ole Miss: Central Arkansas, UTEP, Texas, at Tulane
8. South Carolina: ECU, UAB, Wofford, at Clemson
9. Auburn: Clemson (at Atlanta), Louisiana-Monroe, New Mexico State, Alabama A&M
10. Georgia: Buffalo, FAU, Georgia Southern, Georgia Tech
11. Tennessee: NC State (at Atlanta), Georgia State, Akron, Troy
12. Kentucky: at Louisville, Kent State, Western Kentucky, Samford
13. Texas A&M: at Louisiana Tech, at SMU, South Carolina State, Sam Houston State
14. Mississippi State: Jackson State, at Troy, South Alabama, Middle Tennessee

 

You notice that this year’s Vanderbilt OOC schedule is considered second of fourteen in degree of difficulty. That’s all the word of credit we get for scheduling two BCS-league OOC opponents, both on the road. Missouri has two, but they’re both at home – and frankly were probably booked before they joined the SEC. (Only the Big 12 has more appalling OOC scheduling than the SEC, and where did our two newbies come from? Texas A&M’s OOC lineup certainly has a high glycemic index.)

Florida gets dinged for the fact that it’s been 30 years since they went west of the Mississippi for an OOC game. Well hell, when’s the last time they left the very state of Florida for an OOC game? They plead Florida State, Georgia pleads Georgia Tech, South Carolina pleads Clemson – you can see why we locked up a series with Wake Forest back in 2006, and not a softball either – last year was our first win over our “rival” since it became our season-ending matchup. In the SEC East, though, once you have your permanent OOC rival, it’s apparently just fine to schedule troops of Girl Scouts and last year’s frat league champion the rest of the way. Except for us, apparently.

Look, something had to give. We had five OOC games for four spots on the slate in 2013. And the SEC promptly moved conference games into the weekends where our newly-dropped matchups were scheduled. We could have done some shucking and jiving and tried to make it work so that we could still play three BCS OOC opponents, despite the fact that pretty much every team in the league competing for a bowl slot will only be playing one. Or we could do what we did, and accept the fundamental truth of the situation: we gain absolutely nothing by playing a tougher OOC schedule than the rest of our conference.

Last year we had two BCS teams and Army. Now one of those was a Big East team, and that league’s next deserved BCS berth will be its first, but it is what it is. The year before, we had Northwestern, UConn and Wake, and lost all three. In 2009 we had Georgia Tech instead of Wake, and lost to them and to Army while beating Rice and Western Carolina. And in the 6-6 year of 2008, we split our OOC games – beat Rice and Miami of Ohio, lost to Duke (!) and Wake. Or to put it another way: last year was the first year in as long as I can remember where we swept the board in OOC games. If that’s the case in 2008, we go 8-4. In 2009, we go 4-8. In 2010, we go 5-7. On average, we’re playing multiple BCS OOC teams every year and going .500 against them for the privilege.

Now, another question: where are these teams that are going out to take on all comers? Northwestern had a respectable slate this year (Syracuse, BC and North Dakota in addition to us) but Ohio State? Had a weak Cal team (and got played within an inch of their lives), Miami of Ohio, Central Florida and UAB – all at home. Look the Big Ten schedule up and down – every single team except Indiana plays at least three of their OOC games at home, and Ohio State and Iowa never leave home for an OOC game. And how many of those Big Ten schools are playing more than one BCS OOC opponent in 2012? Here’s the list: Northwestern. That’s it and that’s all.

Here’s the thing: we’ve finished the regular season over .500 three times since the scheduled expanded to 11 games in 1970. The SEC actually only played six conference games a year from 1964 to 1988, but even then, the last time we finished over .500 in conference play was 1982. Before that? 1959, when we went 3-2-2 in the SEC en route to a 5-3-2 overall record. Why do I bring this up? Because we aren’t Auburn in 2004, trying to squeeze into the BCS title game with Louisiana Tech, Louisiana-Monroe and the Citadel as its OOC opponents. We aren’t Boise State trying to get #1 votes with one splashy BCS win and a WAC schedule. We’re not the ones trying to play a national championship schedule. If anybody in this league should hang their heads in shame, it’s the Gators, who the BCS computers think the best in the land off the back of Bowling Green, Louisiana-Lafayette and freakin’ Jacksonville State.

Look, let’s not mince words. Art Guepe left with the parting shot “there is no way you can be Harvard six days a week and Alabama on Saturday,” and he was right. If he wasn’t, Northwestern wouldn’t have had the longest losing streak in the country nor gone almost five decades between Rose Bowl appearances. We have a football program which, in the main, has been a dumpster fire since JFK was assassinated. We are accustomed to seasons when we go winless in the conference. We haven’t seen a bowl game outside the state of Tennessee in almost thirty years – hell, until last year, no Vanderbilt football player in the entire history of the program had ever been to two bowls.
You know how much credit we got for those harder non-conference schedules? You know how much regard we received for trying to punch above our weight? Hell, go back and look at that Sporting News article again – you know what we got for having the second-toughest OOC schedule in this conference? We got Presbyterian name-checked as another laughable piece of SEC scheduling.

No one in this conference is doing us any favors. No one. Not in scheduling, not in officiating, not in television, nothing. We already handicap ourselves in the SEC by honoring both halves of “student-athlete” and refusing to compromise our academic mission. The notion that we have to keep playing tougher OOC games than our conference foes – it is, as I said elsewhere, risible. To what end? To make sure we stay down below the salt in the pickle barrel? To keep various blogger and Twitter jackasses from making fun of us? To atone for the rest of the league’s deficiencies in scheduling? To make the league look like it plays tough, and thus do the SEC a favor it doesn’t do us?

Apologies for language: Fuck. That.

There’s no reason we have to sacrifice ourselves for the SEC’s sins. None. You know what will improve this program? You know what will get us noticed? You know what will get us respect? Winning games. Going to bowls. Once we’re not a doormat, once we’re not a punchline, once we’re not a reason for teams to fire coaches when we win – then we can raise the bar and play the kind of schedule that gets you to New Years Day and beyond. Until then, we shouldn’t apologize for doing exactly what every other team in this league – and others – tries to do: maximize our opportunities for wins.

Our first place of our own in California was in Mountain View, close to Castro Street – the main drag of downtown. And my vestigial cigar habit meant I needed to spend plenty of time outdoors of an evening, which gave me lots of time to wander up and down Castro to see what was doing.  I had been around there before on visits to California – mostly to go to Books Inc and occasionally to Dana Street Roasting – but this was the first time I could really wander up and down and see what was happening.

It’s been eight years since that autumn, and last night I got to see most of Castro en route to dinner.  And what struck me was how much has turned over.  The big appliance store appears to have some tech company in that space. Kapp’s Pizza is now Restaurant 191. King of Krung Siam is gone, replaced with a Cal-Mex fusion place. The former Wienerschnitzel on the corner of California and Castro has been half a dozen things before settling on a burger-and-beer-garden. The cigar shop is now a Mediterranean joint – under the same ownership. The pool room almost immediately turned into some sort of velvet rope nightclub. And the mildly dodgy cellphone-and-clothing shop has turned into three or four restaurants and is now waiting to get turned into Crepevine.

It’s not all bad. The Scientologists are gone, which is fine, as I got my anecdote out of them; they had nothing left to offer but an excuse to cross the road.  La Bamba has arrived, for all my carne-asada-nachos needs. Red Rock has expanded to two stories. Neto is the first coffee still on offer at midnight. Jane’s Beer Store is now open with almost any brew you can imagine, Ava’s has provided a legit grocery store, and Scratch provided a top-shelf date night restaurant with cocktail offerings to match.

Meanwhile, plenty has carried on like normal. Books Inc is still hanging on in an Amazon world, as is the used bookstore next door. The gelato place is still featuring a longer line than the velvet-rope nightclub. St Stephens Green and Molly Magees are still offering plenty of food and drink respectively, although the Saint’s Irish character isn’t what it was when I arrived.  Then again, neither is mine, I suppose. Best of all, Los Charros is still serving up a carne asada plate with a bottle of Jarritos for a price that has climbed from preposterously to merely ridiculously cheap.

But a lot has changed, and it drives home the point that I’ve actually been here longer than I was in DC. In fact, I’ve spent fully twenty percent of my entire life as a Californian now, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.

The buzz around town today is about whether Color is going down or not. Color launched in March 2011 as some sort of social-photo-location app for iOS – basically the perfect storm of buzzword compliance. It went nowhere, reinvented itself as a live-self-video-streaming app, and now is allegedly on the brink of shutting its doors.

And it’s based in Palo Alto, which is the point of this exercise. Of course it is.

What are the things that have transformed American life in recent years? Google: Mountain View.  Apple: Cupertino. Twitter: San Francisco.  Facebook: founded in a Harvard dorm room, but incorporated in Palo Alto.  When they moved, did they move to Texas?  Did they move to Alabama, or Mississippi?  Hell no.  They moved to Silicon Valley.

It’s become fashionable of late for certain conservatives to point to California as a dysfunctional, financially doomed canary in the coal mine of the American economy, on the verge of going down like Greece.  I’ll set aside the fact that if California only paid as much federal tax as it gets back in federal services, the budget would be in surplus (you’re welcome, rednecks) and I’ll also set aside the preposterous clusterfuck created by Prop 13 that requires a 2/3 vote of both houses to pass a budget when 50%+1 of a referendum vote can change the state constitution.  Instead, I’ll just ask: if California is a horrible place to do business, why hasn’t Apple decamped to Austin? Why didn’t Twitter relocate into a nice set of lofts overlooking Railroad Park? Why didn’t Facebook take over a shiny new campus hard by the future Interstate 22 in the scenic bit of Mississippi?

This doesn’t even require an answer. In fact, it probably leads to a lot of guffaws at the notion of, say, Knoxville as the new home of Gewww-gull. But to hear everyone from Newt Gingrich to the Economist tell it, businesses are dying to get away from places like California and relocate to the low-tax laissez-faire paradises of the Deep South.  But there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.  If that’s all it took, manufacturing wouldn’t be overseas and design wouldn’t be in the Bay Area.

Fact of the matter: the Southern approach to economics doesn’t work. You can cut taxes to the bone, cut services to nothing, offer billion-dollar tax incentives to the likes of Mercedes and make up the difference with 9% sales tax and income tax starting on $5000 a year, but it’s not going to deliver the New Jerusalem to your notional Silicon Holler.  Too many people are trying to sell us the idea that the race to the bottom is the only way to turn the economy around – but that only works if you think Alabama is heaven on Earth.

Of which…you know.

So I got the shots. And stayed home all day, and only did a half-day at work Thursday – of which more in a moment.  And I’m feeling something similar to the last round of prednisone – I know that all I had was cortisone in a disk, which should reduce inflammation, but I’m having everything from insomnia to stiff muscles to drowsiness to a cough to weird intestinal happenings…basically it feels like I’m having my DNA rewritten from the inside out.

When I did come in, though, I found out that work will be featuring the kind of emergency crash program that made me in the summer of 2003.  This time, it means a massive cleanup/deployment of stuff that should be out there already: remote management, online backup, and whole-disk encryption.  It’s a huge priority, it’s an emergency, it’s a massive project with a hard deadline, it’s a crisis environment.

And today I broke out the riot reds and my old Indy jacket from DC, because this is what I live for at the office.  Somebody else broke it.  These guys will fix it.  We need fast, effective and brilliant, and we have to have all three.

I’m Winston Wolf.  I solve problems. May I come in?

I’m sure I’ve commented on this before, but it bears repeating: there is a substantive difference between specialist opinion and the general public, and it’s the same in politics and technology alike.  It’s because most people aren’t really paying that much attention.  Take the iPhone 5, for instance – judging from the technology press, you’d think that the iPhone 5 was the biggest disaster since New Coke.  And yet, sales are through the roof and more people are citing the new Lightining connector as a bigger issue than the new Maps.

Similarly, to most accounts, the vice-presidential debate was mostly a wash, maybe a slight edge to the Vice-President – unless you’re on Twitter, where everyone was persuaded that their guy had mopped the floor with the other fellow.  And let’s be honest – between the most gripping playoff baseball in years and a Thursday night NFL game, how many people were paying attention to a vice-presidential debate?  A VP debate is like watching the ACC Championship Game in football – unless you’re watching to see gaffes and to jone on the participants, there’s really nothing to be gained by wasting your time.

The thing is, you wind up with a participatory minority, usually highly partisan and motivated, and a vast majority who doesn’t really care that much or pay that much attention.  This is less scary or upsetting in the realm of consumer electronics than in addressing who’s going to be President of the United States.  But ever since 1996, the push in Presidential elections has been to get your guys to the polls in a low-participation environment, and in some cases to try to press participation down until your share pops above 50% by one vote.

It’s a mixed bag.  People need to understand politics and technology – you don’t have to be an expert, but you should know how to use the tools in front of you.  And once again, I’m starting to wonder if Westminster isn’t a better way – if nothing else, to eliminate the logjam from separation of legislative and executive powers and provide for more rapid-response elections at times of no confidence…

So Levi’s and Filson are collaborating again. This year, the Tin Cloth trucker jacket has an additional black version alongside the tan. And during Bay Super Weekend last Sunday I had the opportunity to try it on at the Levi’s flagship in Union Square.

As it turns out, the fit is a lot more normal. All they had was a large, and I needed an XL, but it was easy to extrapolate from the large that I only need to go up the one size. And the black looked better than I was expecting. I need black outerwear like I need a hole in the head – I have the shell, the Vandy soft shell, the Claiborne casual jacket, the black Uniqlo blouson, the WWDC zip-up thing, plus a peacoat in a true navy that’s almost indistinguishable from black and an old oilcloth duster that came from DC and is probably only of use for costume parties at this point.

So why this one?

For starters, it checks a whole lot of random boxes. Classic American workwear. The denim jacket look without being a jean jacket. Made in the USA by two iconic American brand names. Water resistance without the “performance outerwear” look that everybody else relies on. I may not be a trucker, but I’m a hell of a lot closer than being a hiker.

Drawbacks: it’s woefully expensive. It’s not got a hood, which is a detriment to the whole waterproof thing (although in a steady pour I’m going to be using an umbrella, one hopes). It won’t hold the iPad inside, but that’s what the shoulder holster is meant to provide (once the shoulder is healthy).

But it’s like the automatic watch, or the 1460 For Life DMs, or my Rickshaw and Timbuk2 bags, or the peacoat – it’s something I could legitimately use for the rest of my life.

Something to think about.

No bigs, as it turns out, though it was a far more involved process than I was expecting. I anticipated some betadine, some local numbing agents and bing bang boom, all done in five minutes. Instead there was an hour of prep, a half hour of recovery, an IV line, a sedative, constant blood pressure and oxygen-level monitoring, a gown, a hairnet, and a big bag to keep all my S in for the duration.

But it’s done, and I have laid around the house and done fuckall today, and will do fuckall in an abbreviated day at work tomorrow. And maybe by this time next week, I’ll be better.

It’s weird, knowing that people you barely know and have never met are thinking of you and wishing you well in your time of need. And yet. Maybe that’s how this grace thing works.

It’s all of a piece, when you think about it.  The Me Generation, that sobriquet of opprobrium for the Baby Boomers, is especially appropriate when looking at Team GOP’s plans for Medicare – if you’re over 55, you have nothing to worry about, you will get the same quality government-run free health care as ever.  If you’re under 55?  Root hog or die.

When you think about it, that’s the Randian ethos at its finest: I got mine, fuck you.  It’s become elevated to a cultural imperative – think of the solipsistic drivers that make driving in California so noxious, especially since they always seem to be one-to-a-vehicle. Think of the reality-TV ethic, which is how we wind up with everything from Kardashians to Jersey Shore to Honey Boo Boo – it doesn’t matter why I’m famous so long as you spell my name right, and often. Look at me, look at me, look at me.

Hell, just look at the whiny-ass titty-babies who fancy themselves captains of industry, masters of the universe – they got filthy rich off the Bush Decade, they got made whole by bailouts, they got the stock market roaring all the way back, and yet because Obama hurt their precious fee-fees and suggested they might need to pay the same tax they did during those brutally business-oppresive 1990s, he is beyond the pale and must be vanquished. I got mine, fuck you.

Maybe that’s how I got to be how I am. I didn’t have Boomer parents, so I didn’t get the Millennial you-are-a-very-special-snowflake routine (which I can only assume stems from projecting yourself on your kids) – I was legit gifted and all I ever got was browbeaten with enough humility for any three Buddhist monks.  Think of others.  Think of the greater good. Non nobis solum. Team spirit.  Born to be second-in-command, vice president, senior noncom, the wingman.  I wonder sometimes if the egomania I affected back in the late 80s – or in 2003-04 – might have been better off as real arrogance, real self-confidence, as something other than a front.  Actually, by the end of 2003 it probably wasn’t a front – I was genuinely supremely confident in my abilities, at least at the office.  Honestly I wouldn’t mind getting back there at some point, and I’d even try not to be an ass about it.

Ultimately, that’s the question: because if you think of others, and nobody else does, you’ll get plowed under.  Prisoner’s dilemma.  If everyone else is a dick and you aren’t, you get crushed; if nobody else is a dick and you are, you get your way (at the expense of being liked, I suppose), if nobody is a dick then we’re living in fantasyland, if everybody’s a dick then there is no society.  So if society as a whole is radically oriented toward the mad dickish – where the hell do we go from there?

Actually, never mind. Hell kind of covers it.  Sartre was right.

Five years ago, I went under the gas to have my knee scoped. I was more nervous about it than I let on at the time, because anytime you black out, bad things can happen. Ask anyone who ever woke up on a frathouse couch with someone’s junk traced on their face.  But ultimately, that was my knee, nothing to get too bent out of shape about.

Tomorrow, I will get my neck numbed and a huge needle stuck into my spine, to deliver steroids straight to an inflamed disc that is, to all accounts, the principle issue behind my ongoing shoulder pain these last couple of years.  I am a little sensitive about anything to do with the spine, partly because of my dad’s issues and partly because it’s your goddamn spine. It’s the core of the nervous system, it’s where the action happens, it’s the next thing after the brain.  It’s nothing to fuck with.

On the one hand, my chiropractor recommends this guy as being an artist at that sort of thing, that he’s had thousands of patients and never a glitch. On the other hand, there’s a rash of fungal meningitis back East owing to a bad batch of drugs from a compounding pharmacy (an outbreak that was identified by Vanderbilt University Medical Center after the first case popped up at another Nashvile clinic; Anchor Down).  On the third hand, the scrutiny of drugs is going to be tighter than ever, which means whatever they give me will have been inspected and sorted properly.  On the fourth hand, it’s a fucking needle in my spine.

I’m not freaking out, honestly I’m not. Of course it’s not happening yet.  I’m very good at la-di-da right up until the moment that I’m confronted with not being able to feel my neck when they numb it.  Hopefully they’ll have space to plug in an iPod or something else distracting while the action happens, but probably not.  Price of doing business.  A couple days rest and maybe this’ll be an end of it for a while…maybe a couple more years of normal function before it starts to twinge again.  This is just the price of getting old.