Are my eyes really blue?

Because I need a distraction from all this other bullshit, I’m looking at my gadgetry again.  So bear with me.

After some donking around with various laptops, I have come to the conclusion that while the 11″ MacBook Air may be the perfect laptop for me, it’s not really compatible with work.  The fact is, I need 1440×900 for proper use of Apple Remote Desktop, and a 5-hour battery (probably more like 4) won’t get it done.  So any future work laptop would need to be the 13″ MacBook Air at a minimum.

This brings me back to the idea of the 13″ MBA for work plus the iPad for personal use.  Only problem is I still can’t really use the iPad for ESPN3, or reading thousand-comment threads on EDSBS, or posting to some of my blogs.  But some of that can be done through the web browser (and presumably in private mode) so as long as I *have* the laptop I can still get by.  But I’m definitely counting on iCloud to make it a lot easier to live with a desktop and an iPhone.

Meanwhile, the Kindle is still great for text reading, but not that hot for browsing anything other than Google Reader.  Nevertheless, the fact is, it’s free – and as much as it would not suck to have a 3G-enabled iPad for travel, I’m not sure I want to splash out on exorbitant rates for that access.  Much easier to stick with the iPhone where you’re already paying for 3G as a matter of course.  But it would sure be nice to have that big iPad screen for maps, and GPS to boot.

And today I wandered into work without my power supply for the laptop.  Not very reliable without a place to plug in.  And I can’t really fail over to the Kindle for anything workwise, so it’s got to be the iPhone until further notice.  Huh.

But the iPad is so much easier than a laptop to just pull out and read, and it runs rings around the Kindle for the viewing of PDFs – hell, runs rings around the Kindle speedwise anyway, and so much easier to use at bedtime.  And from a battery life standpoint, beats any laptop…and definitely cheaper to spend $730 on a 32 GB iPad than $1200 on an above-vanilla 11″ MBP.

The thing is, we normally expect to squeeze 3-4 years out of a laptop.  At this point, I don’t know that it’ll be feasible to squeeze more than two years from a tablet.  Now if the tablet is half the price of the laptop, maybe that’s reasonable, but we’re sort of through the looking glass on the future of mobility computing and I don’t know what the new normal is for expected lifespan of devices, especially with the two-year timeframe of mobile phones as the reference point.

And yes, we are squarely back in the “I want to need the things I want” mode.  Look, I’m of redneck stock, count your blessings that it’s gadgets and not guns.  Oh look, there we go again…well, it was worth a shot.

One more norm has gone by the books.  The debt ceiling has been raised dozens of times over the last few decades, with no hullabaloo beyond the out-of-power party occasionally voting against as a political gesture – at no point has it ever been used as leverage to squeeze out some other political arrangement.  Until now.  Just like how the Senate never used to filibuster routine legislation and there was no presumption of needing 60 votes for everything.  Until now.

There used to be rules.  There were ways things were done.  They were there for a reason – because politics used to be the art of the possible, the slow grind of hammering things out day in and day out.  And you didn’t have this kind of blow-it-all-up nonsense because you knew you would have to come back and deal with these people again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after.

That doesn’t exist anymore.  One party – and spare me the false equivalence; there is absolutely nothing comparable on the other side of the fence – one party has decided that literally nothing is beyond the pale and that the goal is to wipe out the other side.  Thus the past two and a half years of scorched earth.  Thus the threat of default that has already cost $2 billion in interest and will probably continue poisoning the economic recovery for months if not years.  Thus the continual mainstreaming of the sort of insanity that was previously reserved for fringe preachers and survivalist nutters.  All taking advantage of the fact that the media is in thrall to the magic median and that our current President is wedded to the belief that reason and negotiation can accomplish something even in this climate.

So here we go.  Expect another government shutdown threat in September when the budget expires.  Republicans will threaten to blow it all up, because they are a party of extortionist thugs, and Democrats will cave because they don’t want the car to go off the cliff.  And the Fox-driven media will blame the Democrats, and the rest of them will wring their hands and cry “a pox on both your houses!” and with nothing to fear more than an equal share of the blame, the GOP will continue with whatever they can get away with.

This is the new normal.  Idiots relying on the reporting of morons and electing assholes.

I want out.  I deserve better than this shit.

John Boehner couldn’t line up a gangbang in a whorehouse.  Unable to get enough teatards on board to break 218, the bill has not come up for vote and won’t until it goes back for more tweaks (at this hour, probably involving more slashing of Pell grant money).  All of this, of course, so it can go die in the Senate.

Whatever else comes of this, you can bet your house, your car and your nuts on this: Boehner won’t be Speaker by Christmas.

Ezekiel 16:48,49: “As I live, says the Lord God, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done.  This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

Here’s the thing that bothers me…yes, we’re about to default, and yes, we would lose our AAA rating, etc etc financial Armageddon.  But there are people saying “don’t panic, at the last possible moment Wall Street will lean on the GOP and they’ll raise the debt ceiling in time.”

Does it not bother anyone else that we’re essentially counting on one party being completely in the pocket of Big Money?  Or that the AAA rating we’re sweating is bestowed by the same agencies that shat the bed during the mortgage-backed-securities meltdown? And that said agencies, who failed to cover themselves in glory these past several years, are now in a position to use that rating as leverage to make their own policy preferences the key to avoiding downgrade or default?

Nothing makes me angrier than the way the Republican party and its amen corner in the press make me feel like some sort of screaming bald-ponytailed Chomsky-Nader bong-watered granola shaver.  But when the press is trapped in the golden mean fallacy while the Confederates keep pushing the envelope, you can wind up a raging leftist hippie without ever taking a step…

The first time I went to Disneyland, I was ten months old. I don’t remember much. The second time was 1988, and we blew through for the day as part of a larger family vacation. The third time was in 2001, with my new girlfriend. And the fourth was the beginning of the current streak, which hit its fourth instance since October 2009 this past month. It also marked my first stay at a Disney resort in years – and that’s a tale in itself.

See, we went to Walt Disney World in 1983, the whole family plus my recently-widowed grandfather, and stayed in the Contemporary Resort Hotel, that icon of 60s futurism with the monorail running down the middle. I ended up there in 1989 as well, on that infamous Scholar’s Bowl trip, and again in 1995 on another family vacation with both my girlfriend and my brother’s fiancee in tow (neither of whom panned out for various reasons). There was also a stay I really don’t like to think about a couple of years later, and another at one of the Epcot hotels in 2003 – but the Grand Californian marked my first Disneyland stay and my first resort outing in seven years.

See, staying on the property with an annual pass means all kinds of things. Discounts in the park, early admission, in our case a private entrance straight into California Adventure – in short, you enter Disney-reality instead of your own. No alarms but what you set yourself. No work to go to. Nothing but Star Tours and California Screamin’ and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye and Pirates of the Carribean and World of Color and fireworks and monorails. And dusk along Main Street USA with “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” quietly piped from the speakers to reinforce the Victorian atmosphere while deftly referencing WALL-E into the bargain.

Leaving is always rough. The real world doesn’t have much to recommend it under the circumstances. And the truly sad thing is that this was the first time in years and years that I found myself at a Disney resort without dragging any extra hangers-on, family or otherwise.

One thing I can tell you for sure, though: as much fun as it is to be in Disney-reality with the girl of your dreams, it’s ten thousand times better leaving with her at your side and going home together.

“Football is back.”

With that one quote, Roger Goddell summed up everything that is wrong with the NFL.

Football never went anywhere.  Football was going to happen in September no matter what.  Over a hundred division-I college teams and hundreds more at lower levels.  Thousands of high schools.  Tens of thousands of pee-wee teams.  Hell, the CFL and Arena leagues have been chugging along for weeks already.

But the NFL firmly believes that it is the only football in the world and that there is no substitute for the NATIONAL. FOOTBALL. LEAGUE.  The smugness, the institutional arrogance, the sheer ego of a league whose bloat encompasses almost every month of the sporting calendar – fortunately for them, they have pulled their nuts out of the fire before the opportunity for autumn without the NFL could be realized.  Which might have demonstrated that there is more to sports than one single hidebound, conservative, stick-in-the-mud league with no creativity and no soul.

This is the problem with being responsible: people will take advantage of your responsibility.  Like right now, when the gang of mental defectives in the House of Representatives is trying to drive the full faith and credit of the United States off a cliff, knowing full well that in the end the Democrats will cave to their demands – because the alternative is fiscal Armageddon.

See, what the retards know is that they will be hailed as heroes by the assorted collection of fossils, rednecks, and slackjaws that supports them – along with their amen corner on Fox and AM radio and in the Wall Street Journal – and that the rest of the media will in their High Broderism declare both sides somehow equally at fault.  So there is absolutely nothing to be lost by throwing reason and responsibility to the wind; in the worst-case scenario you will merely be condemned as an equal part of the problem.

So what can you do?  There’s no accountability moment.  You can’t call new elections.  You’re stuck with this gang of monkeys for another year and a half, and in the meantime you can bang the drum for why they should be turned out of office, but even then you’ll be going up against media of limited intelligence and a public with the attention span of a fruitfly for anything other than “reality” television and white girls in trouble.  There is no SWAT team you can send in to kill the hostage-takers.  There is no Navy SEAL squad that’s going to make “we do not negotiate with terrorists” stand up.  Because that’s what we have here: “we will destroy the economy unless you do as we say.”  Right now there’s no third way. There are only two options: give in and hope they actually do as they say they will if they get everything they want – and hope it doesn’t become the pattern for the next eighteen months – or throw your hands in the air, watch the country go over the cliff, and hope that the responsible parties get the blame.

This was inevitable.  From 1994, when the GOP’s sole policy aim has been “destroy Democrats”, everything has led to this point.  Anyone paying attention in 2009 should have known we would wind up on this path.

Just make sure you have cash and top up your passport.

Norm Ornstein has forgotten more about Congress than every single person working in American media today will ever know.

And he’s right.

We are so screwed.  Because we let people decide that stupid was just fine.  And now we’re going to drive the economy off a cliff because we have people in charge who are too fucking dumb to know what gravity means.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

Is this really happening?  Not content with raiding Virginia Tech the eve of National Signing Day for this year’s class, Coach James Franklin and staff appear to have poached SMU commit Elston Lane – yet another WR speed merchant to go alongside Batey and DeClouet and of course Brian “that guy’s faster than Walt Flannigan’s dog!” Kimbrow in next year’s crop of freshmen.

If.  Big if.

Because now we have to consider something that we may never have had to think about previously.  We have thirteen kids who are technically in the fold…in July.  It’s a long way to February, and in between will be a football season.  And that makes me uneasy.

See, despite the fact that he is already the single greatest recruiter to set foot on the Vandy campus, probably even including Dangerous Dan McGugin, James Franklin is still a first-time head coach in his first year at Vanderbilt.  You have to go back twenty years to find a Vanderbilt head coach who delivered as many as five wins in his inaugural season, and Gerry DiNardo was coming from a stint as coordinator for co-national-champion Colorado.  You have to go back to 1935 and Ray Morrison to find a new full-time Vandy coach who finished over .500 in a non-war year, and he basically inherited Dan McGugin’s last team.

Now, I could be totally off the grid here.  We could be in for the shock of a lifetime.  But guys who take over a program mired in the dreck generally struggle that first year no matter how good they are.  Jim Harbaugh – who just took Stanford, STANFORD FOR CRYING OUT LOUD to the Orange Bowl – won ONE (1) game his first season on the Farm.  Hell, I don’t think Nick Saban had a winning record his first year at Alabama, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to win in Tuscaloosa than in the West End.

And this is not a terrible thing.  It’s not great, but it’s not doom forever if we don’t shock the world the first year out.  Nobody will pronounce the James Franklin Experience a disaster if we finish up, say, 3-9.

But my question is: will we be able to keep thirteen guys in the fold through a 3-win season?

I’d like to think we can.  CJF has apparently made much of telling everyone that nobody’s spot on the depth chart is safe and everybody he brings could take somebody’s job – and lose it to the next guy brought in.  I think the 2011 new guys have to believe that a three-win season only makes it that much more likely they’ll get a shot at an SEC starting job immediately.  I’m sure that’s what CJF is preaching, in any event.

This is all to day that while we’re having a dream summer – a summer that is literally without parallel in our history as a sports-playing institution – there’s a very real chance that autumn will wake us up like a ton of bricks through the window.  If we get to Halloween with two wins, it’s going to be tough to keep the faith.  But if we steel ourselves now, and commit to pushing on through, we’ll get there.  Maybe not this year, maybe not even next year, but soon, this train is going to hit the rest of the league like…well, a freight train.

We just have to believe.  And we have to hope that the new kids keep believing, too.