Are my eyes really blue?

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…

I haven’t had the opportunity to do the “ride around listening to the Redskins” that much this year, largely because of a stereo-related issue that wound up forcing me onto XM and thus losing the Redskins’ broadcast for road games.  Home games only now, and with half the opportunities I wound up missing some weekends, and honestly my heart’s not in it because that team is godawful with few prospects for improving.

Nevertheless, Sunday morning at 10 found me pulling out of the garage with coffee to hand, tuned into the feed from DC, with Sonny and Sam doing their best Statler-and-Waldorf behind Larry Michael’s game attempt to keep the broadcast on track.  Time to go for a ride.

The ridearound had its origins in my senior year of high school, when I’d jump in the car and just start driving.  Gas was a dollar a gallon and Milo’s fries and tea were the perfect accompaniment to Eli Gold and Doug Layton calling Alabama football games on the AM radio, and it became a ritual to drive – sometimes as far south as I could, way down 280 to the far edge of the Birmingham sector, sometimes the long way up US 31 or 78, occasionally into the backwoods between Jefferson and Blount and Walker counties.  Fall colors through the sunroof, Gary Hollingsworth throwing to Prince Wimbley and no particular place to go.

By the time I got to Nashville, I could actually go to games, and the car didn’t have a sunroof, so the few ridearound moments were at odd times and for odd things – running between three different malls on a December night, 20 degrees and clear skies with a radio station out of Cleveland bringing in Cavs-Kings basketball or the outrage at the departure of the Browns.  Plus I actually had teams I could go see in person, so the radio wasn’t that big a deal.

And then came DC.  By 1999, I had brought back the classic ridearound – Burger King for a bacon double with two orders of fries and a huge Dr Pepper, with a possible bottle or two of Dr Pepper to refill with, and at least one cigar and sometimes two.  Then three and a half hours around the Beltway, down Connecticut or Mass Ave, maybe over Chain Bridge, through the highways and byways of northern Virginia.  And I got so stuck into it that I would spend Saturdays or offseason weekends wheeling around with Eddie Stubbs playing bluegrass on WAMU instead of ballgames.

The ridearound didn’t come to California until late in 2006, when the new Rabbit came with Sirius satellite radio – and thus NFL broadcasts.  Even then, the ridearound didn’t become a regular thing – we were away for a chunk of the 2007 season, and the discovery of Dan Brown’s Lounge pre-empted riding around a lot in 2008-10 before it was yanked out from under me halfway through last season.  And without the cigar excuse, there just wasn’t that much call to get in the car and drive to nowhere once gas broke the $3/gallon barrier.

Nevertheless, on Sunday, I saddled up and rode.  Mostly around the South Bay – down into San Jose, around downtown, back up the route of the light rail and down the various surface-level expressways.  I discovered a few things, like a Fresh ‘N Easy positioned right in front of the Fair Oaks VTA stop, or the fairly impressive-looking arena for Santa Clara University basketball (I need to stop in for the St Mary’s game, I think).  But mostly it was just the traditional stuff: light through orange leaves, burger and fries (In N Out, natch) and Washington’s traditional ignominious collapse in the fourth quarter (seriously 21 points given up in the last 5 minutes.  WTF) – and plenty time to relax and just drift along with the road.

* Festivus at last!  Nobody expected Festus Ezili to go 21 minutes last night in his first game of the year, but we needed every one of them to eke out a 4-point win over Davidson after blowing an 18-point lead in a span of six minutes down the stretch.  The book in Vandy basketball is this: hit them hard out of the gate so they play from behind, and don’t worry if they make a run; just go hard at them in the home stretch and you can dig it out.  It worked for Xavier, it worked for Louisville, and it damn near worked for the Wildcats.  We have to learn to finish games if we’re going to survive.

* My current iPhone plan is a legacy account from a previous employer which, to protect its identity, we will refer to as Grapefruit.  My plan includes 450 minutes a month, 5000 night/weekend minutes, unlimited data (no longer available with a new contract), 1000 texts a month for $10 (no longer available; it’s unlimited at $20 or nothing), and a sizeable discount for Grapefruit employees.  And right now, exclusive of taxes, fees, etc, my plan runs me $66 a month, of which $60 has been picked up by my current employer in exchange for using it as my work phone.

Out of curiosity, I tried to reconstruct this now.  Looking at sixteen months of data, I essentially never break the 400 minute mark or use more than 2 GB of data, and I’m not tethering – but I do need messaging.  And that package – 450 minutes, unlimited messages, 2 GB of data – now would set me back around $75 a month plus tag, tax and title, and the difference between Verizon and AT&T is less than $5 a month.  And that’s with the discount from my current employer.

As it stands, my reimbursement has been cut to $25 a month, so my out of pocket cost for my phone is going to be $41 plus the government.  The alternative is to take the work phone and possibly be billed for personal use at $15 a month, and then find myself without unlimited data or the cheaper text service if I leave (because I don’t go over 1000 texts a month at all).  I’m not surprised at this turn of events – since text messages go over the control channels, they’re essentially free to the carrier, whereas data is in demand and highly profitable in a world where people want to stream sitcoms to the phone.  But I’m keeping my phone for now.

* Looking at footwear again, I’m intrigued by the Australian work boot as exemplified by Blundstones – basically a Doc Marten-ized Chelsea boot, with the side elastic rather than laces.  Probably not distinct enough from my current footwear, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in something that didn’t have to lace.  Not just for air travel purposes either, which I’m grateful I’m not dealing with right now.

* In three days, Vanderbilt has sold 88% of its ticket allotment for the Liberty Bowl and has gone back to the bowl committee to ask for additional seats.  Now I kind of wish we were going, but I’m not cised to fly.  To Memphis.  On New Year’s Eve.  Kinda shady.

* ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: having my comments at Anchor of Gold quoted out of context by the Memphis Commercial-Appall [sic] with regard to the hiring of Coach James Franklin.  For the record, my remarks about “Do you want me to cry?  DO YOU WANT TO SEE ME CRY??” were directed at the prospect of Redskins coach Mike Shanahan suddenly becoming Vanderbilt’s coach, which is clearly obvious from looking at the page in question. People wonder why I disrespect American media, well, there you go.  So to Geoff Calkins: read, motherfucker.

* Once again, I am exploring alternative platforms for social media.  Right now, I am intrigued by how many iPhone apps are a world unto themselves, or the basis for one anyway: Instagram, Path, Glassboard, etc. -not to mention iMessage itself, or exotic location-based single-purpose things like Untappd.  Proof, if any were needed, why mobile companies would rather give you unlimited texts and soak you for data.  Or put another way: the price for 2 GB a month on the iPhone from AT&T or Verizon is 50% higher than the unlimited data plan when the first iPhone launched.

* My Buddy Vince Sez, “What is this Path you speak of, and does it lead to bourbon?”

Fin.

If the rumors are true, Friday will see the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon – the long-awaited LTE-capable Google reference phone, running Ice Cream Sandwich on the most potent hardware ever.

Sort of.

See, Verizon has asked Google not to include Google Checkout on their Verizon-edition Galaxy Nexus, and Google is complying.  The jury seems to be out on how big an obstacle this is technically -and honestly, it should be pretty easy to circumvent – but the fact that it’s happening at all is the clincher: Android is no longer “open” in a way that is meaningful for the end-user.

The Nexus line is suppose to be the reference phone, the pure unadulterated Android experience. No carrier interference, no custom UI overlay, no un-removable apps, no screwing around with the prospects for upgrades.  If you get a Nexus, you get raw Android uninhibited by whatever provider you roll with.

Except that doesn’t work for Verizon, or any CDMA carrier for that matter.  With AT&T and T-Mobile (and smaller GSM providers, if any are left), you can always pull out an unlocked phone and pop your SIM in there, and boom, off to the races.  You may be limited depending on who the carrier is – if you’re on AT&T, you won’t be getting 3G service on the 1700 Mhz band on the Nexus S, for instance – but if you bought the phone, you can fire it up.  Not so with CDMA, where you have to call the carrier, provide the ESN and other codes, and hope they’ll allow it to be activated on their network.

Apple was able to work around this, because they could point to the success of the existing iPhone – with no carrier customization at all, with updates and software controlled by Apple rather than by AT&T – and tell Verizon, “Our way or the highway, and the highway is closed.”  Verizon got their custom apps – downloadable from the iTunes App Store if you wanted them, eminently delete-able if you decided they suck, and nowhere to be found when first taking the phone out of the box.  Every Verizon iPhone was able to update to iOS 5 on the day it shipped.  With the possible exception of folks just now buying the iPhone 3GS, nobody who buys an iPhone from a carrier has to wonder “will I be able to update this phone’s software in twelve months?”

Apple cut the carriers out of the loop.  The signature achievement of the “openness” of Android is to put the carrier back in control, and the fact that Verizon can dictate app placement on Google’s flagship device for 2012 is the final nail in the coffin.

The stink around “carrierIQ” is of a piece with this – carrierIQ being a Mountain View-based company who implements software at the most basic level of the phone for gathering metrics on usage.  Officially.  In practice, the carrierIQ layer is capable of everything up to and including keystroke monitoring, depending on how it’s implemented.  Its most basic form was used for the iPhone until recently.  It appears on almost every Sprint phone.  And all the hardware manufacturers are racing to point fingers and say “this is something the carrier installed, we have no idea what it is or how it got there, we swear!”

Nothing has changed.  Thanks to consolidation of carriers and the lack of a single standard, we now have a situation where there are four national carriers split between two incompatible technologies, and each technology has one carrier with two frequency bands and a carrier with only the one.  And only the interference of the FCC prevented GSM from all being consolidated as AT&T, eliminating the last option to move between two national carriers at will.  This might be affected when LTE is more widely deployed – but when the number of national carriers was a lawsuit away from being halved in the last six years, relying on a technological fix is a fool’s errand.

The carriers are running a tar pit.  Now, more than ever, you as a mobile technology user are at the mercy of what the cellular company is willing to allow, and your ability to move between them is more constrained than ever.  The result is essentially a monopoly effect – lock-in effect, increased costs, and less consumer choice.  How else did we get to a point where text messages went to 20 cents each – that is, until everyone locked in on unlimited text only for $20?  As late as 2005, incoming texts on AT&T wireless were free.  Now free incoming text is something wacky you only get in Europe.  Hell, if you don’t like your iPhone plan in England, you can go from Vodaphone to T-Mobile to 3 to Orange to O2 to God only knows who else in the MVNO field.  If you don’t like your service in the US, well, the unlocked iPhone only works with GSM – Verizon and Sprint won’t activate it, and T-Mobile can’t use the 3G bands, so you may as well just suck it up and go with a carrier-locked model.

Welcome to the tar pit.  it’s only getting deeper.

Start out getting to the Beltway on a late Friday afternoon..  At first from down US-50, later (when I got my head out of my ass) via I-66.  Then the Beltway around to I-270.  Around exit 22, the cell phone would drop out and start roaming, at a time when a roaming call might well have a material impact on whether I could make rent.  But I had to have it on anyway, because I wanted to live a life where I needed a mobile phone.

Then onto I-70 west, headed toward Pennsylvania.  After about two and a half hours on the road, down the ramps into Breezewood – the Las Vegas of Central Pennsylvania, the Town of Motels, and technically the home of stoplights on I-70 before it joins the Pennsylvania Turnpike. At this point, it’s been about two and a half hours, most likely, and it’s time to stop.  And it’s not like Breezewood lacks for truck stops.  Break the seal, take a leak, stretch your legs, buy some more Dr Pepper (and if you’re really feeling weird, maybe some cheap-ass cigars with wood tips), and basically load up for the next round….which is going to be four hours on the turnpike.

The Allegheny Tunnel is a checkpoint, looming out of a mountain – and on a snowy night, its lights through the precipitation may be the first real sign that oh God it’s really snowing out there, not like a dusting that shuts a Southern city down and empties the Piggly Wiggly of bread and milk, that’s REAL SNOW.  And after that, it’s just a drive.  Maybe stop somewhere around Cranberry at the service plaza – there’s Burger King there, maybe a late night double bacon cheeseburger and some more Dr Pepper will help finish the push on to Ohio, where eventually the turnpike will change places with I-80 and you’ll free-roll from I-76 to I-77.

Seven hours one way, with stops, and you have to do it with stops.  And tolls.  If you really go balls out after work, or your boss lets you slide early, you might make it by 12:30 AM, but it’s more likely to be 1.

And then, about forty hours later, you’ll set out the opposite direction around 5 PM in hopes of making it home by midnight.  It’s dark by the time you reach the Pennsylvania border, counting the change in your tray to make sure you have enough to get by, trying to calculate whether you need gas at the service plazas or can wait until you’re back past Breezewood the other way.  Fries for dinner, probably, and then the Allegheny Tunnel from the opposite direction, this time across a long and broad and barren landscape…then down through the mountain passes to Breezewood.  And from there, you’re still looking at over two hours home.

The problem with driving almost fourteen hours in a weekend by yourself is it leaves you alone with your thoughts.  The wrong tapes in the car stereo will only feed the introspection and melancholy, especially if your life has been summarily imploded and completely rearranged in the last eight months, and there’s only so much distraction to get from the occasional clear-channel-AM broadcast of an NFL game.  There’s a real danger in getting too much into your own head…a little luck and a little insanity are important in life, but only a fool relies on either.

 

The BCS matchups are made, and no one is happy outside the Dirty Coast.  LSU-Alabama is the least of the controversy; somehow a Virginia Tech team that got clubbed twice by Clemson is going to the Sugar Bowl to take on a Michigan team that got in ahead of a Michigan State squad that beat them head-to-head and sported a better conference record and identical overall mark – and played within a field goal of winning the Big Ten title game.  Meanwhile, Boise State and Kansas State go begging despite finishing 7th and 8th in the final BCS standings, and West Virginia proves why the Big East has never deserved an automatic berth by slipping in at #23 to take on Clemson.

Once again, the annual breakdown of What Would Happen Back In The Day:

ROSE BOWL:  Oregon-Michigan State.  None of your damned playoff games here; Michigan State wins the Big Ten at 7-1 and thus gets the ticket to Pasadena.  This should be a hot one; there might not be a more exciting team than Oregon but nobody answers the bell in big games like the Spartans.

SUGAR BOWL: LSU-Stanford.  Andrew Luck vs the Honey Badger.  You’d watch this, and so would all nine Cardinal fans.

ORANGE BOWL: Oklahoma State-Alabama.  2 vs 3 for the right to be champion if LSU faceplants.  Again, I don’t know where Okie Lite thinks they’re going to find any points against that defense.

COTTON BOWL: Arkansas-Boise State.  Better upgrade the scoreboard software.

FIESTA BOWL: Kansas State-Clemson in the battle of nobody gives a shit, because Fuck Clemson.*

CITRUS BOWL: Wisconsin vs South Carolina.  That badger is going to kill somebody.

And there’s your national championship picture.  LSU can win out by beating a 1-loss team ranked #4.  Or it can lose and the winner of Bama-Ok State can grab the ring.  Unless they look unimpressive while Stanford positively thrashes LSU (don’t make me laugh, their non-cons were Duke and San Jose State).  Meanwhile, we get some really good games to pass the time during the Moveable Feast, which itself has moved to January 2 this year so I don’t annoy the hell out of all the hungover guests the morning after the party.

Once again, we’d all be better off if the BCS never existed and we went back to how things were in 1990.  But if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a couple of years, you know this song already…

 

 

* Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson each get a nickel.

Everybody gets paid today.  James Franklin’s contract is “torn up” according to Vice Chancellor David Williams, who always looks as if he should be sipping on 23-year-old Pappy Van Winkle neat while smoking a cigar the size of a telephone pole.  Details of the contract are not forthcoming, but it should be sufficient to ward off the rumormongering of other coaches while ensuring that Coach Franklin’s kids will be able to wake up Christmas morning and unwrap the GI Joe with the kung-fu grip.

More to the point, everybody gets something.  Assistant coaches all get raises.  Players get a new indoor practice facility, built big and wide with resources for other teams as well – and all Vandy athletes get to chow down at the Magic Man’s new and improved dining hall.  Ticketholders get a new jumbotron and a complete review of the stadium situation with an eye toward all manner of improvements.  Hell, the money is echoing so loudly that former ‘Dore wideout Earl Bennett even got a 4-year $18M extension in Chicago.

But most of all, Vanderbilt football fans get hope – the hope that goes with the biggest university commitment to the SEC’s flagship sport since the retirement of Dangerous Dan McGugin.  VCDW looked ready to wade into the crowd of media and start throwing punches as he flatly declared “We’re not talking about the past.  We’re building the damn thing.”  Coach himself was up there making the same pitch he made from day one – Ivy League education, SEC football, the city of Nashville and the opportunity to play right away – and you can almost see him looking straight at the likes of Gunner Kiel when he says it.  Come with us, he says, and you can be part of the legend.

So will it work? Will the fans pack the house?  Will we sell out the bowl game and season tickets as requested? It’s tempting to think we could, but that dream is tempered by the experience of seeing a Stanford team, ranked in the top 6 with a Heisman-caliber QB and a BCS bowl berth already slotted, playing their last home game with tickets being handed out four-for-free to faculty, staff, students, and military – and not filling a 55,000 seat stadium for a conference foe.

I’m hoping Vanderbilt is different.  Sure, there’s also Nashville-based NFL ball, which honestly sucks up most of the footballing oxygen for non-alumni in the Bay Area, but Nashville is also in the heart of SEC country, where alumni status is the last thing you worry about in supporting a team.  Roll a successful squad out there for a couple of years in a football-crazed part of the world, and people are bound to at least pay attention, not least when coupled to the novelty of a top-20 academic school making top-20 football noise.

But there’ll be time enough to worry about that.  Twelve months ago, we found a ray of hope in the most hopeless place.  Now, in what should be the bleak midwinter, it’s raining nothing but sunshine.

Brand. New. Vanderbilt.

…because the travails of the Commodores have basically carried NaBloPoMo this year.  Apologies to the maybe three people actually reading this blog, who are probably all sick to death of Anchor Down and Who Ya Wit. ;]

Christmas season is upon us.  Lights are around the trees, peppermint mocha is in every coffee purveyor’s establishment, I came downstairs this morning and the tree was decorated, and right on time, the Killers have released this year’s Christmas track. “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball” is a rootin’-tootin’ Western-influenced two-stepper, as you might expect, and you can really see the influence of Brandon Flowers’ Nevada-centric solo album from last year.  I’m about ready for them to get back in the studio and get to work on a fourth full album already.

Another nice touch is that the whole collection of Christmas tracks, one annually since 2006, is now available as an EP “album” from the iTunes Music Store in aid of World AIDS Day tomorrow.  I’ve written previously about “Joseph, Better You Than Me”, and last year’s single “Boots” was as perfect a melancholy slice of “you can’t go home again” as the season calls for.  Because Christmas, more than any other holiday, always brings with it the memory of days gone by and the bitter truth that things aren’t how they used to be.

This year, though, I’m going to try to focus on having a good holiday season.  These are the things you can normally only tell in retrospect, but I think I knew in 2008 that it was going to be a good one, with a job change coming up and Vanderbilt going to a bowl and not having to get on a plane in December.  2009 was less so, although that’s probably down to spending eight straight days in Alabama, and 2007 or 2010…well, that didn’t go well.

This year I’m reminded of 2006.  We did things, for sure, but in a lot of ways it was the year of the dull moment, of being settled into routine.  Perhaps coincidentally, it’s also the last time we took in a lodger.  Having other people around is good for conversation, good for help with the chores, good for occasionally sitting down to family dinner, and – in my case – good for the indulgence of football and vice.  Even if the vice has transitioned from whiskey and cigars to the casual Old Fashioned after finishing the dishes. (I’m still owed one, just for the record, and I intend to take it this evening if possible.)

My choice this year is to embrace the holiday.  Smother in it.  Go ahead and drink those peppermint mochas and sweat the cholesterol after first of the year.  Go ahead and start playing the Christmas songs the week of Thanksgiving while still at work, even the weird obscure British stuff about holly and the bleak midwinter and all those things that sound more like they ought to be part of a service at some Oxford chapel about six hundred years ago.  Hell, go for that first.  Keep creating confusion around presents to ensure some sense of surprise at what you actually get to open on the 25th.  Go to the parties.  Watch the movies.  Soak up the moment, every moment, and worry about the future when it gets here.

Easier said than done, I know, but I’m going to give it a shot nonetheless.

I have made no secret over the years of how the words “please advise” as a sentence by themselves make me reach for my revolver.  And I don’t even have a revolver, despite my insistence over the years that tech support staff should be dressed like the Stig and armed to discourage random grabbing in hallways or cafeterias or bathrooms (not kidding).  The warning for IT staff should be like the warning posted behind MUNI drivers in San Francisco: “Information Gladly Given But Safety Requires Avoiding Unnecessary Conversation.”

The use of words and jargon outside their industry goes beyond the annoyance of people who say things like “a software”, though.  Take actual laboratory science, for instance, where the word “theory” has a very specific meaning.  Unfortunately, the rest of the world uses “theory” like scientists use “hypothesis” and that’s how we get the disdain of the holy rollers and their anti-intellectual enablers for things like “evolution is only a theory” or “global warming is only a theory.”

One problem we’ve experienced in every place I’ve ever worked stems from the rise of Mac OS X, a UNIX-alike multiuser system (as opposed to the old-style MacOS/DOS/BeOS single-user turn-it-on-and-go model).  We always run into problems over the fact that users invariably want “administrative rights.”  Now, in UNIX, the word “rights” has a very specific meaning in terms of defining what any given user (itself a word fraught with meaning, as it refers to an account rather than an individual) is capable of doing to a file or directory on a specific UNIX system.  I argued for years at my first job that we should avoid using the word “rights” simply because it was idiotic to provide any sort of nurture to the idea that any randomly selected person behind a desk should have final say over a company-owned resource, including the ability to lock out the IT department tasked with the support of the system.

Now, we find ourselves in a similar spot, a continent away: the combination of company policy and federal privacy and data security requirements will probably require us, at some point in the near future, to start messing around with the constellation of privileges for end-user accounts.  The problem is, this toothpaste is surpassing difficult to get back into the tube.  For one thing, there’s the prospect of laptop users running into problems while out and about that can’t be solved without administrative access (oddball networking issue?  Weird printer driver install?)  For another, there’s the added layer of difficulty with having to invoke support for heretofore routine tasks (are we going to have to walk around and run Software Update every week now?  Or do it through Remote Desktop? Are we going to staff up to meet the demand?)

The real problem, of course, is that there are occasional users who are very capable and self-sufficient and can be trusted not to do anything stupid to burn their computer down.  There are also people who call you up asking for “a software” that somebody told them will solve all their problems – you know, the ones who tend to have four toolbars installed in Internet Explorer.  Crafting a one-size-fits-all policy isn’t particularly good, but even more difficult is creating a mechanism by which the right people can get the right privileges while the people with their hands in the paste pot are prevented from doing anything foolish.  And worst of all are the toy-boys who want to run things like private VPN and remote control software and then put them on other folks’ computers as well.

Like it or not, if you’re going to run an IT environment with a limited support budget and staff, your only resort is to go full-on black shirt.  Lock everything down beyond belief and start unlocking only the things people need as they need them, until you hit some sort of equilibrium.  And ideally put folks on Macs with ARD, to make your life easier in terms of malware and stupid-ware.

Or you could just start handing out revolvers.

If any proof were needed that the Occupy Wall Street movement has lost the plot, it was on offer Friday afternoon in San Francisco.  Traffic ground to a halt around Union Square as a crowd of protestors – complete with signs and drums, of course – camped out in the intersection of Post and Powell, which naturally provoked a chorus of car horns and not a small bit of opprobrium from shoppers.  Meanwhile, three cops on horseback rolled their eyes, but otherwise stood there doing nothing.  So what was being protested?  There were a few signs about “BUY NOTHING” and general anti-corporatist rage, and Black Friday is certainly the right time for such as that, but is that what the Occupy movement is about now?  Because if it is, Ed Earl Brown has tuned out.

You remember Ed Earl Brown, our notional middle-American.  He’s in dire straits, he’s underemployed, the wife’s barely keeping food on the table, the house is upside down and the mortgage isn’t great.  You know why Ed Earl’s wife was at Wal-Mart at stupid o’clock Friday morning?  Because the only way to make the Christmas dollars go far enough is to head down to the annual cattle run for $200 flat screens and hope not to get trampled, tased or pepper-sprayed.  Yes, kids, it’s bloodsport on Black Friday these days.

Ed Earl has a vague sense that something is very wrong with this country, that things have gone off the rails, that it shouldn’t be this way, that the deck is somehow stacked in favor of everyone who already has money.  Ed Earl would like to see Wells Fargo get theirs, or Bank of America, or one of these other financial entities that went to Vegas for a decade, got Uncle Sam to make them whole, and promptly turned on their own customers to squeeze them until the pips are squeaking, as if Matthew 18:25-35 were never written. (Look it up, you heathens.)

But Ed Earl does not identify with a bunch of bong-watered granola-shavers getting into fights with the cops.  Ed Earl is not down for the destruction of capitalism.  And if you ask Ed Earl what the Occupy movement is about, he’s probably not going to be able to tell you other than it looks like a bunch of hippies.

This is the shortcoming of OWS.  They rejected any idea that they should have a set of demands, which is fine – but they also failed to deliver a clear, sound-bite-friendly summation of their grievances.  And spare me the complaining about sound bites; if Our Lord could deliver a summation of Christianity in twenty-five words in John 3:16, nobody else has any excuse.  Come to think of it, if every OWS-related protest was waving signs that just said “MATTHEW 18:25-35” it would make a universe of difference in terms of perception and messaging.  But how hard is it to say “the banks got bailed out and went right back to doing the same things as always”?  How hard it is to find people who got baited-and-switched on mortgages, or improperly foreclosed on by banks who were crying to Uncle Sam with their hats in their hands three years ago?  How hard is it to keep the spotlight on the shenanigans of the financial sector and how there has been no accounting for their role in tanking the economy?

But no matter, the plot is well and truly lost.  Thanks to the usual suspects and their ill-informed amen corner in the professionally indignant left (looking at you, Naomi Wolf), it’s the age old hippies vs. cops tale, and the hippies are always going to lose that one.  The only thing turning the tide are the optics of UC-Davis campus police hosing down unarmed seated kids (with tuition-paying parents) with military-grade OC spray, and naturally the apologists of Fox are comparing it to a condiment. As opposed to contemplating the idea that local governments have militarized their police departments in the name of a “war on crime/drugs/whatever” that would give any actual anti-government true believer the screaming purple fits.  I mean, if you really do fear your government, wouldn’t you be a little concerned that the old-school revolver and billy club have been replaced with tasers AND pepper spray AND metal batons AND semiauto pistols with multiple magazines and over fifty rounds of ammo AND carbines or even submachine guns in the trunk of the car?  The pant-shitting militia types never seem to be bent out of shape over the fact that the local cop on the beat has a bigger and broader array of firepower than any workaday federal agent.

Long story short: the infinite distractability of the American public continues to act in the service of the 1%.  Anyone can tell you what’s wrong with this country, but nobody can focus long enough to do something about it.