Are my eyes really blue?

“…I’d imagined those shoes. And when you imagine something like that, you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit. And sometimes they can. For a season or two.”

-Meredith, Zero History, William Gibson

So I know I’ve spoken at some length before about wanting things not because you need them, but because you want to need them – whether it’s a Barbour jacket and day pack for me to hike the Cotswold Way in, or for a 100-shot C-Mag drum on a full-auto M4 so Bubba can fight the gay brown liberal hordes threatening his own ignorance – and it occurs to me that once again, William Gibson has stumbled onto something very profound.

So many of the things we want are tendrils of our dreams.  And not just the physical objects, either.  A walk to the Riptide, out at the end of the L-Taraval when the fog is coming on strong, like a visit to a small pocket of some different reality.  A high-speed dash on the Deutsche Bahn from Paris to Munich to Switzerland invites contemplation of a world where extremely rapid rail trumps both air travel and freeway driving as the best way to be whisked long distances. A sit-down at Trials Pub, which has no television to interfere with the background murmur of old 2-Tone, a crackling fire, and the light rail gliding by outside.  Or maybe just the title track from the last album by Madness, “The Liberty of Norton Folgate”.  It is their “A Day In The Life” and it is an amazing madcap wander through centuries of London history…and in the iPhone headphones on a dark evening, it’s enough to make a Timelord of you, stepping in and out of the river of time, “in your second-hand coat, happy just to float”.

Then you have the things themselves, like the steel-toed workboots that I needed when I was having my best year at my best West Coast job in 2006. Couple them with a work jacket to keep off the chill and deflect sparks from the iPad in the shoulder rig out by the smoker on a cold morning, Absolute Radio’s Rock and Roll Football streaming in from London, and it’s like I’m down by the allotment shed practicing my peculiar American hobby before walking out to market with the wife.  Or my peacoat, which I wanted for ten years without thinking exactly why – but realizing now it’s perfect for the Outer Sunset with wind and fog but no rain.  Or the iPad itself under the jacket (or even in a ScottEVest jacket?) and a sturdy pair of boots to use while spending my days wandering around the city, a digital nomad taking in everything around me without having to carry so much as a water bottle.  Or those amber-polarized Ray-Bans, the rose-colored glasses through which I saw so much of 2005 and 2006 and which make the world seem a little better by looking through them.

And I suppose deep down that’s why I want a top-of-the-line smartphone, a good pair of Palladiums and just the right second-hand coat…because at some level I think if I’m dressed for the dream, I can at least walk in its shadow for a little while. 

* Cal won, 50-31, but the score was 20-17 at the end of the 3rd quarter. The Bears are not a good team this year. In fact, based on the current schedule, there’s not another sure win the rest of the way. Road games against Ohio State and USC are next, and on form, it’s pretty much a lock that Cal will come home 1-3 to face the same Arizona State team that beat the hell out of Illinois last night.  It’s looking grim for the Tedford era.

* Vanderbilt’s loss last night was closer than the score indicated, but they got only 10 points off three red-zone drives in the first half – the last one a turnover inside the 10 to end the half. They never recovered.  The offense simply could not get on track – John Donovan’s play calling is coming in for heaps of abuse today – and Jordan Rodgers is just not effective under center.  He ends up running the ball too many times, deliberately or otherwise, and the actual running game with the much-vaunted deep field of running backs has failed to materialize.  At least next week is Presbyterian – as sure a thing as is possible to imagine – and after road tilts at Georgia and Missouri, the schedule begins to soften down the stretch.  Even so, 6-6 may be the best to hope for, and both of Vanderbilt’s recent 6 wins seasons began with a winning streak of at least 3. Overcoming the slow start might be the biggest challenge.

* Robert Griffin III has paid immediate dividends.  7-7 for 123 yards and a touchdown to open his NFL account, the rookie QB finished with over 300 yards passing, two touchdowns, 40 yards rushing and no turnovers (not to mention a passer rating of 139.9). And he delivered all this with a rookie starter at running back (who himself had two rushing touchdowns and almost a hundred yards on the ground).  I can’t remember the last time the Redskins hung 40 points on anyone, let alone on the road, let alone on a team as formidable as the Saints.  It might be time to re-evaluate the long-term prospects for this franchise; eight wins suddenly looks a lot more reasonable with the sloppy game the Eagles put together and the last-place schedule the Skins get to play (starting with the Rams next week).

* First live Vandy game since 1996 in six days. Of which more later.

Forget that the $50 annual LTE data plan only gets you 250MB a month (enough to carry me for a week on a tablet, and worthless for streaming).  Forget that they’ll all have ads on the screen. Forget that the 9-inch model won’t ship until Thanksgiving.  What Amazon announced yesterday demonstrated that they get what tablet computing can do for them and their business.

Amazon forked Android to run their devices.  This was a good move before, when Honeycomb was a big bag of suck. It might not be as necessary now, but Amazon wants a UI optimized for purchasing and consuming media – more than anyone else, they’ve embraced the accusation leveled against tablets in general and the iPad in particular. The Kindle Fire is just fine being a tool for consumption. It wants you to consume, and it wants to sell you things to consume.

Which explains the price point, no doubt made lower by the ads: Amazon can’t be making much money on these things.  The retail cost is mostly commensurate with similar devices, but the specs suggest that the profit margin has been pared down to a nail-clipping.  When Google does this with the Nexus 7, there’s a reason: get a good clean Android tablet experience in front of people as easily as possible. But when Amazon does it, it’s with the confidence that they’ll make it up on sales later.

And they will.  Books, TV shows, movies – all available through the browser, and Amazon Prime streaming is tooling up to take on Netflix (and stands a pretty good chance of doing it).  There is an Amazon App Store, which provides an Apple-esque curated experience and the assurance that you can browse through and all the listed apps will definitely work on your Kindle Fire.  And because the consumption experience is so tightly integrated, there’s the power to do things like X-Ray, in which you watch the movie, say “hey I know that guy”, tap on his face AND GET HIS IMDB INFORMATION.  Amazon’s bringing Augmented Reality to movies.

Some people are comparing Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs.  I think that’s a stretch, but more than anyone else who’s jumped into the tablet game since the iPad, he gets it. He’s not making a tablet for the sake of “we need to make a tablet,” he’s making a tablet that serves his company’s interest and provides a smooth and easy portal into Amazon goods and services for his customers.  Amazon is the first (and to date, really the only) company to meaningfully take advantage of Android’s vaunted “openness” – they’ve used it as a foundation for building an integrated product.  Which is significantly different from “we need a tablet, here’s an operating system that don’t cost nothin’.”

I guarantee you when Apple goes to bed at night, they don’t worry about Samsung at all. They probably don’t worry too too much about Google or Microsoft yet. But they probably sweat the hell out of Amazon. And well they should.

In the mid-90s, Extreme Championship Wrestling out of Philadelphia became famous for its hardcore fans, who packed the ECW arena and were merciless in their critique. When two skilled wrestlers were going at it, they would chant “THIS MATCH RULES.” And when somebody blew their spot or missed a move, they were relentless: “YOU FUCKED UP, YOU FUCKED UP.”

Tonight, the entire political world watched the Big Dog eat one more time, and as one voice they chanted (or ruefully admitted) THIS SPEECH RULES.

Brother Bill’s One Man Traveling Salvation Show rolled into Charlotte tonight, and I say that on purpose. Many policy wonks and those who wished they were have tried to sell their ideas to the American public. Paul Ryan is merely the latest in a long line of smart guys who thought they would sell their plan and people would see how smart they were and go along with it. Ryan suffers partly because his plan is full of shit and falls apart when examined closely, but who on Earth can make people examine it closely? (“Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” hits) OH MAH GOD THAT’S PRESIDENT CLINTON’S MUSIC!!

Because the only three people in the mass media era who could compete with the Arkansas Traveler are all dead in the ground, and I don’t know if Reagan, Churchill or FDR could spend 48 minutes going off script, playing the crowd like a harp, and simultaneously explaining with figures and math just how flawed the other team’s argument was while building a case for his own side. As it is, Clinton’s revival-preacher shtick kept plenty of people sufficiently rapt to hear, digest, and comprehend the case against the GOP and for Obama’s re-election.

And it didn’t necessarily have to go down like this. Much has been made of the gulf between 42 and 44 during the 2008 race and after, and the halting steps to try to come to some sort of reconciliation. But when Team Romney pushed all their chips in on a deceitful ad that tried to tie Romney to Clinton’s welfare reform and paint Obama as undermining it…they made it personal for Bill Clinton. And Bill Clinton is a man who takes everything very, very personally.

So what could have been a perfunctory (by Clintonian standards) routine ego bath and afterthought endorsement (think Chris Christie at Tampa) got turned into a better part of an hour with Bill Clinton, a shotgun, a barrel, and two very slow fish. And he just…kept…shooting.

Tomorrow is another day. Always is. But tonight, the political world looks at Team Romney and chants “YOU FUCKED UP.”

So we have new phones.  Motorols ships their new RAZR line, a whopping 4.7″ display with big ol’ battery to match…and last year’s version of Android.  Google OWNS Motorola Mobility now.  No, seriously, Motorola Mobility is a subsidiary of Google.  So why in the actual fuck is any RAZR shipping with other than Jellybean as the OS?

Once again, the maxim holds true: you buy a Nexus phone so you’ll know what next year’s Android phone is.

Meanwhile, Nokia is already catching hell for faking the video for their image-stabilization demo on what is otherwise an impressive-looking piece of kit, the Lumia 920.  It’s the world’s first Windows Phone 8 device, and that ain’t hay – WP8 is supposed to be the all-everything competitor to Jellybean and iOS6, and Nokia has always known how to make reliable hardware (the 1100 series is still the gold standard for basic phones and owned the developing world for years) so maybe they’ll puzzle it out.  Of course, with the new iPhone right outside the door and no ship date or price info for the Lumia, the odds of jumping much past third place are not too too good.

No announcements today – or lately – from Research In Motion.  Actually, they need to change their name, because as far as the Blackberry is concerned, the wheel may be spinning but the hamster’s deceased.

The announcement dropped yesterday: Apple event, September 12 (I’ll be out of town, time to charge up the iPad) and most significantly a big shadowy 5 at the bottom.  Which means, in defiance of all logic, they’re going to call this thing the iPhone 5 – something I didn’t think possible, something I am sure wouldn’t have happened if Himself were still calling the shots, because this is the SIXTH iPhone. It already has the A5 processor, so it can’t be a reference to that…the only explanation is that they want to get into a rhythm with 3G (the second one; so-called because the iPhone in 2007 was EDGE-only), 3GS, 4, 4S, and now 5…which means 5S in 2013?  Who knows.

I’m going to hold out.  Partly because I’m out of contract and don’t want to commit to anything, partly because I’m seriously considering a carrier change and want to see how performance works out (both between carriers and relative to the 4S), partly because I want to see how good iOS 6 is on the 4S.  And partly because I want to wait for it to show up in the various work contracts so I can ditch my personal phone and let work pick it up from now on (at a net savings to me of $35/month)…

There’s an uneasy sense around Apple these days.  I don’t know if it comes from the clunker of “5”, or if it’s down to the iPad mini that everyone is trying to wish into existence (and feeling like it’s chasing inferior products from Samsung, and only there to cover the niche that the Nexus 7 is blowing up into), or if it’s the new head of retail who is apparently not competent to empty Ron Johnson’s recycling bin – and who has already had to backtrack vigorously from a plan to cut down staffing in Apple stores.  Maybe it’s just unease at the Nexus 7, and the fact that Jellybean is finally a good enough version of Android, and Microsoft is finally back in the game – all of a sudden, the battle is joined, and there’s no longer a sense of inexorability and inevitability around Apple.  The iPhone “5” (sigh) is going to need to bring things back to the cutting edge, or it’s going to be hard to shake the sense that after four unstoppable years, people are beginning to catch up.

So Michelle Obama killed it last night. Not surprising.  She has the highest approval ratings of any figure in American politics, and pretty much every intellectually-honest Republican (read: not tea bagger) will concede that whatever you think of the Obamas and their politics, they have done a fine job raising a family and being parents.  I think the passage of time has made this much easier on Michelle than it was on Hillary.

What was also interesting to me was to see my Vanderbilt football Twitter timeline blowing up with players going off about how great Michelle Obama was, that she should run in 2016, that if all women were like that men would have no shot – and then Josh Grady, the WR/recruiting coordinator from Florida, opined that if you do the math, Romney has no shot, simply because if Obama’s supporters are fired up to turn out the math doesn’t work for the GOP.

And this is why Vanderbilt is the school of brilliance all around – because he nailed something demographers have been pointing out all along.  By 2020, it will no longer be possible to win the White House exclusively with white votes, as Romney/Ryan are attempting to do this year.  Demography alone will either usher in an age of Democratic hegemony or force the GOP to broaden its base and nudge us back toward two broad-based parties.  In other words, exactly what we got in The Emerging Democratic Majority a decade ago.

But our redshirt freshmen wide receivers can intuit this.  Which is why, SEC, we are better than you in every way that matters off the field. =)

Meanwhile, we just have to hang on as a nation for another decade or so without letting the Old Ones run the world into the ground…

So apparently Cal QB Zach Maynard missed a tutoring session this June past.  There were rumblings around the Internet that he might be struggling academically, but throughout the summer and into practice, the coaching staff insisted that Maynard was eligible, that he was the starter, and indeed he took almost all the first-team work leading up to the home opener.

However.

Officially, the timeline goes like this:

JUNE: Maynard misses his tutoring session.  Jeff Tedford makes the decision to suspend him for the first quarter of the home opener.

LAST THURSDAY: Tedford informs Maynard that he will be suspended for the opening quarter of the game, despite his having taken all the first-team reps in practice that week.

LAST FRIDAY NIGHT: Tedford informs the rest of the team, including backup QB Allan Bridgeford, that Maynard will be suspended to open the game and Bridgeford will get the start.

LAST SATURDAY: Maynard is announced as the starter, Bridgeford comes out and plays the first 14 minutes, and in front of a bewildered crowd goes 1-for-8 passing as Nevada runs out to a 14-0 lead ahead of a 31-24 victory over Cal in the re-opening of Memorial Stadium.

It is difficult, in retrospect, to see any way Jeff Tedford could have more thoroughly mishandled the situation. Team discipline did not require keeping the team in the dark. Nor did it require keeping the backup QB in the dark and then throwing him to the wolves.  Or, as I said last December:

Next year: eight wins, victory over at least one of the LA schools, and the Axe. Otherwise, he goes.  Jeff Tedford has already demonstrated he is no longer fit for purpose as head coach of the Golden Bears, and is only spared this year on account of the bizarre circumstances of the season.  But next year’s order is simple: win or you’re gone. Cal can flop without paying two million dollars a year for the privilege.

On balance, it looks like this should be Tedford’s last season.  Based on yesterday’s performance, eight wins seems far too much to hope for.

Another year, another one-score loss to a ranked SEC opponent highlighted by an obvious no-call on pass interference to Vanderbilt’s detriment. Should be used to it by now, and honestly, we need to take better advantage of our opportunities.  Eight trips across midfield needs to yield more than 6 points.

But I’m fucking sick of it.  When those toothless morons chant “SEC!” they don’t mean us.  When ESPN endlessly jocks the “TOUGHEST CONFERENCE IN AMERICA” they don’t mean us.  When the national media comes calling for the SEC, they mean LSU and Alabama and Florida (OH GOD DO THEY MEAN FLORIDA). We’re not “real” SEC. Kentucky and Ole Miss – OLE MISS WHO WE BEAT FOUR OF THE LAST SIX – pencil us in as their likely win. Everyone else pencils us in for an automatic.  Hell, Texas A&M and Missouri are already assuming wins on us, which is fucking rich after spending two decades in a league that doesn’t know the meaning of defense. No wonder the league office thinks we obviously need to be de-emphasized in favor of the “real” teams.

Fuck the SEC. Fuck this shithole league. We are too good for this conference.  We play fair, we stay off probation, we graduate our players, and we have fans and alumni who can read and write.  No other school in this garbage league can say all of those.  So fuck you, Mike Slive. Fuck you, Steve Shaw.  Fuck your slack jawed hillbilly Klan troglodyte Neanderthal league right up its fucking cornhole.

I’m done defending this conference, and if I had the cash, I’d get General William Tecumseh Sherman’s ancestors on the phone tomorrow and ask for an estimate.

I went through a long and rigorous process in 2006 of paring down who I was to affiliate myself with when football came round.  Go all in on my ancestral team, despite its foibles and embarrassments?  Load up on the wife’s team, then riding high in the polls and on the field alike? Or embrace the team I had grad-school ties to, the doormat of college football, the laughingstock of the SEC?

I did a lot of agonizing on whether I could legitimately claim Vanderbilt – it was my grad school, after all, and I left under somewhat ignominious circumstances after only three years – but ultimately, the logic I came up with was:

1) I did spend three years there, during which time I had at least as much legitimate collegiate experience as I had in four years of undergrad.  Indeed, from a day-to-day standpoint, far more than in undergrad – I had the card to swipe in vending machines, I had the Overcup right there on campus, I had SEC sports and team merchandise on sale at the mall, and – most of all – I had friends of my own.

2) I had the degree and the ring.  There was nothing that said they had to grant me the Master’s, but they did, and I walked, and it was the last time my dad saw me alive.  And ironically, I walked that day next to a former classmate from high school geometry, who I wouldn’t see or hear from again until she turned up fifteen years later on Facebook as a foreign service officer in the Ukraine. A lot of people washed out of that program and found their lives taking very different courses, I suppose.

3) I could have gone undergrad. Should have, in retrospect, but the only offer was 75% of tuition plus $2000/yr, and their admissions office had been decidedly indifferent.  They could afford to be, I suppose.  The other school rushed hell out of me and sent me mail every other day for two years and made me think they wanted me more than any other school had ever wanted anyone – right up until the moment I arrived.  Which makes it all the more ironic to remember that once I showed up on campus at Vandy, it felt like home from day one in a way no other place in my life ever did.

4) The things I learned at Vanderbilt – how to troubleshoot a Mac, why to order a Manhattan, and never sleep with anyone crazier than you are – are all things that have been critical to success in life ever since. I may not use the degree for anything but resume laundering, but the things I actually learned at Vanderbilt were absolutely critical in rebuilding my life in DC and thereafter.

Based on those criteria, I decided that I could, in fact lay legitimate claim to Vanderbilt as alma mater and sporting affiliation, and on those grounds I kicked my undergrad school down the black hole and dissociated myself with the Crimson Tide for everything not involving Auburn, Tennessee or a national championship. (And truth be told, I was only supporting them last year against LSU inasmuch as a Tide win would flush the BCS. I wanted LSU to actually win the title.)

That was six years ago this month. Since then, I’ve been rewarded with a Sweet Sixteen berth in 2007 and an SEC tournament title in basketball in 2012, not one but TWO bowl appearances in 2008 and 2011, including six wins both seasons, and a baseball team that’s no stranger to the rank of #1 in the country and has multiple assorted SEC titles and a College World Series appearance in 2011. Factor in some women’s titles in cross-country and basketball and a couple of Nobel Peace Prizes, several alumni gatherings, two live basketball games and a whole weekend series of baseball, and there you go…and then there’s the matter that I’ve become a little bit of a figure in Vanderbilt fandom.  Over 400 people follow my VU twitter and I get plenty of hits and comments when I post at AoG.  I made the decision to go in on Vanderbilt, embraced it, and it embraced me back.

There is an important lesson here, something about how you can decide for yourself who you want to be instead of letting the world make the decision and abiding by it, but I’m not sure I’ve fully learned it yet.  And even if I had, I’m not entirely sure I’ve got a good grasp on exactly who I want to be.