Are my eyes really blue?

My first instinct, unsurprisingly, was to be pissed off at the end-users.

That should have been a sign that the Internet had become the default means of getting news at work.  As word came in that an airliner had hit the World Trade Center, the phones to the help desk were jammed with people demanding to know why they couldn’t load CNN, or the webpage for the Post or the New York Times.  At one point, I actually said something about “only our users are stupid enough to believe they’re the first person to say ‘I know, I can find out about this on a website!'”

For my own part, the first thought was the B-29 collision with the Empire State Building in the 1940s, after which fixed-wing aircraft were barred from flying over Manhattan (save for the vehicles of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, another nugget picked up from junior-high comic book readings).  Another collision, fifty-plus years later – how do you get that far off track?  Hell of a coincidence…then, the plane hit the other tower, live on TV.

Once is happenstance, twice coincidence, and the third time, enemy action. Hat tip, Ian Fleming.

At that point, we knew some seriously bad shit was going down.  The towers hadn’t even fallen when they closed work for the day.  My boss went around the loop making sure everybody who needed a ride was accounted for, and about that time was when we started hearing about the Pentagon, and rumors of a car bomb near the State Department.  And since my work partner’s girlfriend worked in Foggy Bottom, our little gang of four immediately set off, on foot, to see what was happening.

I had an Ericsson LX280 phone at the time, which was significant because it was a TDMA-era WAP-capable phone.  I didn’t have two-way text messaging – almost nobody did, unless you had a rare GSM phone – but I was able to get to my email when nobody could make a phone call, and I was able to push out a couple of quick emails to the effect of “we’re OK.”  Once we had my partner’s girlfriend collected, the five of us bought burgers and fries and sat out in the grass, waiting for more work of what was happening, before finally retreating to the boss’s apartment.

From there, we flipped between channels trying to get any sense of what was happening.  Planes all grounded, obviously.  News from Afghanistan that there were rocket attacks in Kabul, possibly the Northern Alliance taking revenge for the death of its leader.  At one point, we walked down to the Mall to see what was happening and to shoot some video, and I remember pointing at the camera with my tumbler of whiskey and warning our future offspring that “it’s not cool to walk around with a glass of booze in public at 2 in the afternoon.  These are special circumstances.”

And at the end of the day, a one-stop ride under the river to Rosslyn, where I could walk the rest of the way home.  And the news in email that we had two people on the plane that hit the Pentagon.  And the sick realization that things were going to be different.

And then the next morning.  Up and off to work, same as ever, only this time there were Humvees and National Guard on every corner in the city.  And I felt the oddest compulsion that I should have brought them donuts, or something.  And into the office, to help my boss unlock the voicemail and access the desktops of the two deceased so their next of kin could get at the information.  And making ourselves available to help one of our favorite users, who had just found herself in charge of the travel office with her boss’s sudden death.

And when we walked out at 6 PM, my boss turned to me, and we shook hands, and said “Good day’s work.”

We were there the next day too, and the day after that.  I stood outside in the drizzle, in my all-black and my duster, and stared at the flat-panels on the sides of the building showing Fox News’s broadcast of the memorial service at National Cathedral.  My wardrobe being what it was, I had black to spare.

Eventually, the Humvees disappeared from the street corners and the combat air patrol subsided.  And still we walked around on a knife-edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  When the anthrax showed up, we couldn’t really say we were surprised – and one friend almost got evicted as his rent check sat in the shuttered Brentwood post office.

But I don’t remember panic.  Except for those first fleeting moments when we thought our buddy’s girlfriend might be in danger, I don’t think anyone ever actually panicked.  For the most part, those first weeks were mostly tied up with deep breaths and “keep calm and carry on,” even if we’d never heard of that poster.  I distinctly remember, around Thanksgiving, seeing a commercial for the USPS playing off the old “neither snow, nor rain” with the addition of “nor a nation challenged” and wrapping up “…from the completion of their appointed rounds.”  And then, all by itself on screen, the addition: “Ever.”

And for a moment there, the postal service went from government bureaucracy to Stupendous American Badass with just one little word.  And that was really what I was feeling, and I think most of our gang as well – yeah, it happened, and it’s a show, but we – ain’t – going – nowhere. DC was home.  Buy the ticket, take the ride.

December is when I started to get a little pissed off, too…

…here, too, I want to acknowledge my friends…[i]t’s nothing against anyone else or the rest of the world, but all the patriotic posing and whatnot back in Alabama grated a little.  Yes, I know that everyone’s vulnerable and the danger is everywhere, but this is DC.  It’s our backyard that the plane crashed in, our co-workers on board.  It’s us who took antibiotics against possible anthrax infection and us whose mail was held up for days and us who saluted armed National Guardsmen in jeeps on every street corner for days.  And we’ve only got the command and control nerve center for the whole thing.  DC’s got more skin in this fight than anyone but New York, and it grates a LOT that the rest of the world seems to have forgotten we’ve got any at all.  Of the DC 7, we all came here for love or adventure or personal improvement or something, but it sure wasn’t to be here for this.  So a big shout out for us…

That was from my blog in 2001.  Very little has changed.  Every single TV channel in the country has to have their retrospective. The local NBC affiliate is, of course, having their own September 11 weep-o-rama with coverage from both New York and…Shanksville, PA.  Meanwhile, people in flyover states are howling at the “Ground Zero Mosque” (or, more likely, “Mosk”) which was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero.  To this day, one of the things that brings on the purple spots in front of my eyes and makes the steeltoe bootlaces tighten all by themselves is hearing some loudmouth from somewhere else telling us how we should feel about the fact that we were attacked – within my own city limits, literally.  I know how to feel, fuckface, I was there.  My cousin, who evacuated from Katrina with his fiancee’s wedding dress tied up in a Hefty bag, knows full well what I’m talking about.

Because that’s what it’s become.  “9/11” is America’s patriotic mascot, its ritual obeisance to its military and its first responders, but most of all, it’s the evergreen excuse behind which a certain sector of our population – and its amen corner in the mass media – breathes over and over again, “Live in fear.” Fear of the sucker punch, fear of the unknown, fear of the different, fear that something, somewhere, might change.

They can say what they damn well please, but I was there. And I can tell you with my hand on the Bible if you like, and you can put it on our tombstones – we feared no evil.

Ever.

…that I’ve been blogging at this address and under this name and URL for five years this month.  That’s longer than any other blog solution I’ve continuously used – whether it was LJ, or Blogger, or Blosxom or Vox or even the plain text updated every couple-three weeks back before I realized I was blogging.

It’s a good thing.  Not everything goes up here, obviously, but it’s handy to be able to trace what I was thinking when.  Match it against the contents of the iTunes playlists and fragmentary postings elsewhere and I can usually piece together what I was thinking in a useful fashion.

I’ve also been thinking about other things.  Anyone who reads this and knows me will instantly recognize me, and I’ve probably been sloppy enough that someone who really made an effort could piece it together.  I’ve also tried to carve out a little more separation in some areas of my life so that the most active part of my online existence these days doesn’t point right back here.  But I’m also sitting on a useful URL that would make a great blogging home, except that it would also be pretty transparently me – and I’m not one of these Millenials who believes that any attention is good and it’s OK to post my party pix in a Tinkerbell costume where work can see it.

I don’t want to do this for a living – I’m not sure I could do this for a living – but the notion of being sat with my feet up in a cozy little hole-in-the-wall, typing out my thoughts while the fog swirls outside?  Very enticing, whether in San Francisco or London or Edinburgh or some windswept pub out on the moors.  I think I’m in one of those phases where my life is much more about settings and characters and less about the plot.  Now all Our Hero needs is his peacoat, his Wayfarers, a new pair of Palladiums and an 11″ MacBook Air to take on the road…and two tickets to somewhere else.

It looked like it had all come together.

September, 1993. Beginning of senior year.  A schedule that was pretty much a milk run – with all of my general-ed requirements and major credits filled, I could load up on things like tennis and Intro to Computer Science, along with that Shakespeare course I’d always wanted to take.  A month working for the Dean’s office resulted in my becoming the teaching assistant for PSCI 101, so I was getting some CV-building credit.  A sudden flakeout by someone I didn’t know resulted in my being offered the post of sports editor of the campus newspaper.  And I was on the verge of finally getting shut of the girl who’d done so much to ruin the first three years – and better yet, replacing her with a bright and witty six-foot blond, just like I’d always wanted.

And that’s not even counting the external factors, like Clinton in the White House or Alabama defending a national championship or me riding a new Saturn SC2.  The music from those days is mixed – U2 meets The Music Man meets the best of Bananarama (!) – but almost without fail, it’s bright and upbeat and says “you know what, hang the last three years, it’s going to work out this time!” And for a couple of months, it actually did.

That was before I realized just what “schizoid” really meant.  Like, serious DSM-IV schizophrenia.  At least, that’s the only explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with.  And one of the great regrets of my life was not having my fairy godsister to tap me on the shoulder and say “you can’t save her, but you can still save yourself.”

I guess the critical accomplishment of the last five years was learning to be my own fairy godsister. =)

I know much was made of how the President “backed down” regarding the scheduling of his address to Congress, but after the media attention last night to the GOP debate – and to Rick Perry’s assertion that he intends to run as both Jed Bartlett’ opponent from The West Wing and as the scourge of Social Security – I’m starting to wonder again if there’s not some “pleeeeeeease don’t throw me in that briar patch” going on at 1600 Penn.

The chaos is well and truly underway.  The Big XII is finally imploding, with the imminent departure of Texas A&M to the SEC leaving only nine teams behind.  Now the rumors are starting about Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to the Pac-16 (!) and Kansas to the Big East (where their football-to-basketball ratio will be an asset rather than a liability).  Missouri keeps getting pitched as a possible 14th for the SEC.  And this leaves Baylor, Iowa State, and Kansas State…standing without a chair when the music stops.

In 1984, the Supreme Court rules that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust law by collectively selling the rights to college football broadcasts.  As a result, 64 schools broke away and formed the College Football Association to sell their game rights to the highest bidder, while the Big Ten and Pac-10 in turn made a separate deal with ABC.  Famously, Notre Dame then went to NBC for their home schedule exclusively, and before long every conference was trying to make the best arrangement for itself…which is how we got here.  The SEC got the world from CBS and ESPN, only for the Pac-12 to get the universe from Fox, and now the arms race has hit critical mass yet again.

The situation we find ourselves in is this:

1) Conferences will be increasing their membership in an attempt to reopen their broadcast deals and negotiate better arrangements for themselves.

2) Most conferences are at 12 members already.

3) Conferences larger than 12 are inherently untenable owing to the limited number of games available in a season.

4) Conferences as large as 16 will invariably function as a joint alignment of two 8-team conferences, and will in almost all cases result in splitting up intraconference rivalries.

5) Superconference realignment for football purposes stands to have a deleterious impact on non-football sports.

6) At some point, schools will be unable to keep up with the arms race associated with major college football, either from a financial standpoint or from an unwillingness to prioritize the sport.

 

We are reaching a point where another CFA-type situation is in the offing.  The biggest-ticket programs – think the SEC exclusive of Vanderbilt, the Big-XII as of last season, USC, Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, probably BYU and possibly Ohio State and/or Michigan, and possibly a few others – could conceivably assemble themselves as a new CFA, withdraw their football programs from NCAA sanction and set themselves up as their own thing.  Call it the College Football Premier League.  All the big-time programs – Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, USC, Ohio State, basically anyone who’s played in a national title game or more than one BCS bowl in the last decade – will go off on their own, along with the Auburns and the South Carolinas and the Oklahoma States and the Texas Techs and the other schools intent on being a football factory first.

Say, the top 64 teams, organized into four 16-team conferences for the sake of a name and a title game, but effectively playing in 8-team pods en route to an 8-team playoff for their own championship of college football.  And the rest of what’s currently NCAA Division I-A possibly reorganizing as a sort of I-AA-plus, possibly with its own championship tournament, possibly not. Either way, you can forget about the bowls, save perhaps as a sort of framework for the Premier League playoffs or a series of consolation matches among the teams knocked out.

Except for the Rose Bowl, of course, and the Big 14 and Pac-14, which probably won’t go for that Premier League nonsense.  Or maybe they will, who knows – but then, if there’s a bowl and a conference that have always held themselves to be above the rabble of mortal football, it’s the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten.  So who knows.

Either way, I doubt Vanderbilt makes the cut.  The eternal argument – serve in heaven and cash fat checks, or reign in hell and be the best of the dregs? – might be settled forcibly.  I doubt the new-look CFA is going to be all that concerned with AAU membership or endowment and research credentials; the key metric will be the ability to deliver eyeballs on Saturday afternoons…

They’ve got it down to a science in Boise.  Get a season-opening game against a big-name program of suspect quality, win big on national television, and glide to an undefeated season, constantly moaning about disrespect and being ignored and not getting a fair shake – while getting a half-dozen ESPN games and opening the year ranked #5.

Nobody is saying that Boise State wouldn’t do just fine in another conference – even in the SEC or Pac-12, they’d probably be good for at least 9 wins a season – but the notion that they could roll undefeated through any conference but the WAC, year after year, is risible.  But they are the darlings of ESPN, so now we get to hear all about them for another four months.

You know, sports is really taking more from me than I take from it lately…

The mall is an easy place to see what’s doing with the tablet business. It seems like every other shop has some Honeycomb-based Android gadget on offer. Telling, though, is the fact that they’re all 10-inch models. So much for the notion that cheap 7-inch tablets would eat the iPad’s lunch. Ironically, the rumblings about the new Amazon Kindle based on an Android fork are making me interested in the 7 again. A 7 might fit in a jacket pocket. An iPad or its imitators? No chance.

Sony has some new tablet that’s thick and round at one edge, a bit like a folded magazine or a regular tablet with it’s cover open. My immediate reaction, unfortunately, was to blurt “You’re not serious.” I don’t think a wedge-shaped tablet is the key to consumer electronic resurrection for Sony, alas.

All these tablets – whether at T-Mobile, AT&T, the Sony store, the Verizon kiosk or the Samsung display – are a widescreen 10.1″ that strongly suggests they are meant to work horizontally first. The vertical orientation was not comfortable for the DSC-in-law and I suspect the round side of the Sony was an attempt to cope with that.

Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich is the answer. Having a unified Android release for all devices might help clean up some of the fragmentation issues – and hopefully put an end to the custom UI blight. But the fact that Amazon is choosing to fork – and the Great Mentioner is higher on the putative Kindle tablet than any iPad competitor yet – suggests that once again, the key to a mobile device is cutting out the carrier and designing the whole widget yourself.

Are you Superman disguised as Clark Kent, or are you Clark Kent disguised as Superman?

“It is still the single most breathtaking play I have ever seen not because of the raw athleticism, but because it was never over for George Teague. To hell with the flags, or the angles, or the score: if Lamar Thomas were streaking toward an endzone a thousand miles away, guided toward it only by the sun, the stars, and a compass in his soul pointing towards the goal line, George Teague would have found him and stolen the ball and run the other way until he died exhausted and alone.

“It happened on a down that appears in no stat line, no sheet of formal records. The turf is Astroturf, the game a glorified exhibition put on by a corporation hiding under the guise of a non-profit, involving players likely violating the rules of amateurism, beaming through satellites to flicker on the television of a fake house in a fake neighborhood in a fake state to a family in the last stages of living under the same roof. And yet it still stops my heart when I watch it. George Teague doesn’t give a shit what down it is. He gets the ball, or he dies.”

-Spencer Hall, “God’s Away On Business”

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

This time, things will be different.

That’s been the message for months now.  This time, we’re not going to hire whatever random school’s assistant will take the job.  This time, we’re not going to pay lip service to “winning the right way” and promptly drop ten games. This time isn’t going to be another dose of “Same Old Vandy.”

Now is different.  Now we have a young, energetic coach who believes in the program and wants everyone else to believe.  Now we have upgrades to the facilities, to the tailgates, to the locker rooms.  Now we have multi-star prospects poached from big-ticket programs, guys with three and four and five stars who mockingly try on a Vol hat before declaring “it doesn’t fit” and choosing us.  Now, we have YouTube video going viral and Twitter accounts whipping up the faithful and blogs to bang the drum.

And now, it’s our turn.

We have been made a promise: that things are going to be different.  Now it’s our turn to hold up our end of the bargain.  We have to watch.  We have to show up.  We have to be black and gold from stem to stern.  We have to scream, and shout, and sing, and carry on like it’s the end of the world.

If you’re a student, use your tickets.  Make it the whole day.  Start early, stay late, on time and on target.  If you’re a season ticket holder, fortify yourself however it takes and be prepared to be leather-lunged and sore-footed by day’s end.  If you’re local, and you haven’t got tickets, climb over the fence.  If you’re not local, tune in.  Find the stream.  Find a radio.  Wear your black and gold.  Throw up the VU at everyone and no one.  Blog.  Tweet.  Don’t let anyone in a Commodore shirt walk across the street from you without “WHO YA WIT!” even if you’re three thousand miles from campus.

We don’t know how this is going to work out.  Nothing is certain, and we could still find ourselves looking up at ten losses despite everything.  This is a bet – that we can change the course, that we can turn this thing around, that we can transform Vanderbilt football into what it once was, what it should always have been, what it can be going forward.  But James Franklin, his staff, his administration and his student-athletes are going to lay it all out there to make it happen.  They have promised us everything they’ve got.

What are you prepared to do?