Are my eyes really blue?

I think anyone who grew up a nerd in the 80s identified with the X-Men.  If you were gifted, or gay, or a minority, or just struggling with puberty, it wasn’t tough to see yourself in the Marvel depiction of the travails of being a mutant.  And it was a lot closer to home if you were actually attending a “School for Gifted Youngsters.” (And the headmaster-figure was legit bald.  Albeit with a terrible rug.)   One of the geniuses of the Marvel concept of “fear of mutants” is that it’s always been applicable to something – whether it’s racism and apartheid in the 80s, or homophobia in recent years, or hell, even just the eternal struggle with being the weird kid.  In short, the struggle for mutants is about how society fears the different.

Long ago, I summed up the Southern brand of conservatism as “the pant-shitting fear that someone, somewhere, might be different.”  Nailed it, too.  Look at what W.J. Cash had to say about social conformity as the strictest rule of the post-Confederate realm – in 1941.  Look at the moral panic over illegal immigration – Georgia chose to have its crops rot in the fields so they could bash brown people again.  And don’t even get me started on my own college experience as the one student with no affinity group.

The key thing about the X-Men is that they don’t have a villain as such.  Charles Xavier has a dream, while Erik Lensherr is preparing for a nightmare, but they’re looking for the same thing: the safety and survival of mutants in a world that heretofore hates and fears them.  The Martin-vs-Malcolm parallels are done to the point of being ham-fisted, but they’re there for a reason.  Magneto doesn’t see himself as a villain, and Stan Lee didn’t see him as one either.  Magneto is there to save his own kind from the bigotry and ignorance of others.

And make no mistake, we’re not short of either.  If ignorance ever goes to $100 a barrel, I want drilling rights on the House of Representatives and every state between South Carolina and Mississippi.  Right now, we’re on the brink of an historic economic calamity – an actual default on its debt by the United States of America – because of people who are in thrall to bigotry and ignorance.  And they’re not budging.  On that or on anything else.

I want to believe in reason.  I want to believe that you can negotiate.  I want to feel like it’s possible for people to make a deal in good faith, grounded in facts and logic, and that a best-possible outcome is somehow attainable.  But more than that, I don’t want to suffer because somebody else chose to accommodate the spectacularly retarded.

I want to believe in Professor X.  But right now, I want Magneto.

Happy birthday to the United States of America, which can always be counted on to do the right thing in the end after exhausting all available alternatives.  Here’s hoping for 236 without a fucking catastrophe.

Cory Batey.  Caleb Azubike.  And Brian Kimbrow, by some accounts the top high school football prospect in the state of Tennessee.  And then, late the same night, Jaydrick Declouet of Louisiana jumps on the pile.  In one day, as many top prospects as Vanderbilt would get for years.  Twelve – TWELVE – commits for next season.  Some of the top talent in Tennessee and Georgia alike.  And in Kimbrow, a burner with 4.2 speed rated by some services as the second-best all-purpose back in the nation.

In. The. Nation.

It’s been almost fifty years since Art Guepe said “There is no way you can be Harvard Monday through Friday and be Alabama on Saturday.”  The last Vanderbilt coach to win a bowl game (before Bobby Johnson in 2008) wasn’t bitter, supposedly, but matter-of-fact about the incompatibility of top-ten academics and top-ten football.

And Coach James Franklin has said, in a word, bullshit.

His pitch to the kids, supposedly, is “why not?” Why not play the best football in the country and get a top-10 education to boot?  Other coaches are warning you how tough the academics are – do they think you’re not smart enough?  You can get an Ivy-caliber degree and you can play on an SEC football team right away – would you rather sit on the bench for years at Auburn or Tennessee, where you can be good, or would you rather come to Vanderbilt, where you can play right away, get a killer degree, and have a shot at becoming immortal?

The trick, obviously, is keeping the commitments through National Signing Day in February.  A lot can happen.  But I suspect that a lot of the kids from this year’s class – the Josh Gradys and Lafonte Thorogoods – will get a ton of playing time, and the current kids will see that Coach Franklin is serious about building the talent behind them, and he will point to how quickly that school in Palo Alto went from 1-10 to the Orange Bowl.  And Kimbrow has already said his word is good, and he’s not taking any more visits.

The most amazing part, to me, is that Tennessee is officially running scared – we now have triple as many kids in the fold as they do, and their fans are freaking out.  All of a sudden, we’re getting the kind of message board abuse that was usually directed at Florida or Alabama.  And the screams of the haters are…magical.

Is this real?  This can’t be real.

Other conferences have something else.  The Big East was built on basketball from day one.  The ACC became so.  The Pac-10 was known for playing every sport there was, especially Olympic sports.  But the SEC has always been about football.  Three teams can hit the College World Series and finish 1-2-3 in the nation, Kentucky can be one of the great powers of basketball, the Lady Vols can rule women’s hoops, but all of that is secondary in the Southeastern Conference, where you are judged in your very essence on your football team.

And make no mistake, we have been terrible.  Absolutely terrible.  The competitive era ended around the time that Coach Guepe packed it in, and in five decades you could count the bowl bids on one hand (and the bowl wins on one finger).  0-for-SEC records?  Common.  Blowouts by five or six touchdowns?  Frequent.  Seasons measured on how often we managed to cover the spread on a ranked opponent?  Standard.

We don’t take recruits away from Tennessee, or Notre Dame, or Stanford.  It just doesn’t happen.  Our guys turn down Columbia or Tulane or Western Kentucky to play football in the West End.  We get a thrill in our heart to have a couple of three-star players in the recruiting class.  Even the success is touched with tragedy, as in the case of Rajaan Bennett (RIP), the five-star running back who never lived to set foot on campus as a student.

We’re a doormat.  We’re a disaster area.  Duke can win an ACC title, and Northwestern can go to the Rose Bowl, and Stanford and Georgia Tech can play in Orange Bowls, but it doesn’t happen for us.  We don’t get the talent, we don’t get the breaks, we don’t belong in the SEC.

But that’s not what’s happening.

It could be us. We could win games.  We could win bowls.  We could be ranked.  We could take what happened in the first half of 2008 and make it real and make it regular.  We could make people nervous about playing Vanderbilt, and not because they might overlook us. We could prove we deserve to be in the SEC.

Maybe it will all go to hell.  Maybe we’ll be 0-8 by November and everything will be falling apart.  Maybe it’ll be back to “Same Old Vandy” and we’ll look back at this summer and kick ourselves for being delusional.

But maybe not.  I want to believe.  And now it’s possible…

 

This post has been eaten twice by ecto, so I’m going to try again later in another medium…

Well, here we go again: Google is launching a Facebook killer. (If you need proof, just look at the fact that the launch of a limited public beta of Google Plus was all over the nightly news on Tuesday.) And this time, it won’t be a big bucket of used WTF, like Google Wave, or a sudden revelation that Google owns your privacy like Google Buzz. This one will be different, honest.

Actually, it may be.

It looks like Google is going to school on what Diaspora does (and what Facebook seems intent on preventing) – providing a means to granulate your social interactions. Not all-or-nothing, but discreet slices of your contacts, so you can parse out what your relatives see versus what your co-workers see versus what your actual friends at work see versus what your cool cousins see versus what your gang of reprobates back East can see…and just to minimize the suck, they have none other than Andy Hertzfeld on the interface design. If you’ve ever used a Macintosh, you’re using a Hertzfeld creation, so this should give you some idea how much better the UI will be compared to, say, Google Wave.*

The other competition, of course, is Twitter. Sure, Twitter doesn’t offer a lot of granularity, but it offers something better: completely pseudonymous accounts, free of charge, allowing you to have one or two or five (in my case) or as many as it takes for you to keep the aspects of your lives separate. Sure, a bit of a PITA, but all the official Twitter clients support multiple accounts. Easy peasy. To me, that’s why Twitter has basically displaced Facebook: it’s simple, it’s easy to use from PC or phone app or text message, and most of all, it’s a dumb network. Dumb networks are important, because they let you send anything and put the intelligence at the ends of the communication. Putting the brains in the network second-guesses what the users at the ends actually want.

That pseudonymity is probably why I won’t go very far with Google+ (although that ridiculous name is worse) – it ties into your existing Google account, which just leads to one more node in the data farm. Dave Winer has it right: just like Microsoft had to tie everything back into Windows, Google has to tie everything back into search – and more importantly, into their advertising mechanism. But hey, to all accounts, it looks good and works fast. Which is a step in the right direction.

The real problem is this: how reliable are the privacy controls? How deep is Google getting into your life? Because if there are limits and control over it, that might still make it a better option than Facebook’s oopsy-daisy approach (which reared its head again this week, possibly leading to my permanent departure). The problem of social networking is that you have to give up some of your data to make it work – and the people in the middle get hold of it, too.

Actually, though, almost all my friends have iPhones now. Maybe it’ll just be all iMessage all the time…

* Back in DC, a “wave” is the sudden feeling you get when you urgently need to take a dump. Actually, in retrospect, Wave was the perfect name for that product.

#1 – South Carolina

#2 – Florida (which went 1-4 against SC)

#3 – Vanderbilt (which went 1-5 against FLA)

For the NCAA committee that seeded us 6th, and the Baseball America polls that kept voting Oregon State over us all year right up until we clowned them out of the Super-Regional, and everyone else who suggested that we were anything but a top-5 team: DEEEEEEEEEZ NUUUUUUUUUUUUUTS.

The Chromebook is out. I’m sorry, but after all the nonsense that’s going on with Google and Facebook and each one’s attempt to become the other, I can’t pledge myself to a computing device that relies on logging into a data miner to make it work. Besides, the only thing the Chromebook brings to the table is Flash and a keyboard.

The iPad is the default winner for vacation time, when a) I don’t need work resources like ARD access and b) I need something I can pull out of the bag and fire right up. That said, I think it might just get passed by the 11″ MacBook Air once they go Thunderbolt. But it’s still not worth paying for myself, especially when reading books and RSS can be done with the Kindle (along with some light Wikipedia work) and the iPhone holds for everything else.

Thing is, the iPad just slaughters everything else for reading, especially reading PDFs. Screen size matters. A lot.

The reason this will become important shortly is twofold:

1) iCloud is coming to replace MobileMe, and with it iDisk – heretofore the most important piece of my ongoing backup solution. Just drag links, pics, documents, etc. to an aliased folder on the desktop and see them magically backed up to iDisk – which will not now be doable. Oh yeah, just use Dropbox, you’ll say – the same Dropbox that removed passwords from access control for a few hours? Thank you NO. Maybe for just random stuff, but it’s not a long-term solution for replacing iDisk if iCloud doesn’t have that same remote storage capacity.

2) I might be inheriting a MacBook Air at work. It would replace my existing laptop. The performance boost and weight loss would be PHENOMENAL, but I would be giving away my 320 GB hard drive, and with it my 200GB home directory (which is 80% iTunes content). This means moving the bulk of my operations to the home Mac mini, which itself has a hard drive that’s straining at the seams…

On the other hand, synchronizing the iPhone at home over the local Wi-Fi is supposed to be automatic and easy with the iOS 5/Lion combination. I’m kind of counting on that. I’m also really counting on being able to use Back To My Mac for a while longer, though I don’t know what the future is there either…

But all this is worth it if it cuts my computer weight in half. Given how bad my shoulder has been lately, it’s totally worth looking at alternative arrangements. And to be honest, it won’t suck to get my personal material off my work computer…

On my bachelor party trip to Atlantic City, one of my colleagues fitted me with his Serengeti shades – the classic wire-framed gradient sunglasses that made me look …well, like you’d expect a bachelor party-goer in AC to look. As it turns out, I cleaned up at the craps table, and with my ill-gotten gains I returned to California and bought a pair of Ray-Bans. Unlike any previous sunglasses I’d bought since reverting to contacts in 1992, though, these had brown lenses. Polarized, of course, with the result that I had glasses that altered colors but did an amazing job enhancing contract. Green foliage, for instance, popped like never before. And they were the shades I took to England on the honeymoon, with the result that I started thinking of the amber as my own rose-colored glasses – only when I wore them, things did legitimately seem to go better.

Then in June 2006, I sat on them. I still have them, but they’re not really wearable at this point, so I drove up to Sunglass Hut and bought a pair of New Wayfarers (RB2132) in tortoiseshell brown with the amber polarized lenses. And since it was the middle of a heat wave, I kept driving north until I saw fog, mainly to get proof that God had not abandoned us to heat and death. And amazingly, a day or two later the heat broke and things got back to normal.

June 2006 was when my surrogate big sister moved in with us for a year, and when we moved offices in Cupertino to a new off-campus facility that provided us with tons of space and me with a new office with better air conditioning. Things were much greener there – actual trees, as opposed to a lot of dirt and railroad tracks. When you cross the tracks around here in the summer, and there’s nothing but cloudless blue sky and still air and dead grass and dirt, it just feels hot as hell even if it’s only about 80. But we had lots of willows around and that most precious of commodities…shade. I had friends in town for WWDC, I had a pre-production iPod jammed in one pocket, I had an Intel-based 13-inch laptop at home…it was probably the tail end of the high-water mark of my time at Cupertino Hexachrome Produce, Ltd.

Summer of 2006 meant World Cup soccer, followed by the race to pick out a team for the Premiership. We stumbled into Newcastle United, and gave them as loyal a following as we could manage, and they promptly tanked their way right out of the EPL a couple years later. And then I lost Setanta on the cable, and that’s how I wound up casting back and forth between Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur (with occasional sidelong glances at Everton). It was also the swan song for Danny; over 200,000 miles on the odometer and with strange sounds coming from brakes and axles and engine alike, it was obvious that the time was coming when I’d need a new car (and the research hit fever pitch pretty quickly).

Now the new car has 60,000 miles and we’re preparing for new roommates again. But the most remarkable thing in this whole tale is that five years later, I still have the same pair of Wayfarers. I don’t know anyone else who’s gotten five years out of expensive sunglasses without losing or destroying them, myself included – except for Wayfarers. The moral of the story: if you’re going to spend the dough, buy classic.

Yesterday’s ever-charming State Senator Scott Beason (Asshole-G’dale) has really stepped in it now. On top of everything else, he is currently testifying in a corruption trial where gambling interests were attempting to bribe various state officials. He went in there wearing a wire to gather information for the FBI and other law enforcement bodies. And proceeded to make spectacularly racist remarks WHILE WEARING A RECORDING DEVICE.

Actually, let me clarify: while wearing a recording device TO GATHER EVIDENCE THAT WOULD BE ENTERED INTO THE RECORD AT TRIAL.

Actually let me clarify yesterday’s hammer: I was smarter in 1978, as a first grader in Scott Beason’s third grade class, than he is RIGHT NOW.

If you want to see what the apotheosis of the modern Republican party looks like, you look to the South. And if you want to see its future, you need only look at Alabama State Sen. Scott Beason (R-Jugtown). The Gardendale member of the “upper body” of the state legislature has had quite the busy month.

First, there was the abortion bill, which is not surprising – you expect a GOP-controlled legislature in the South to try to outlaw abortion wherever they can, and the 20-week limit is predictable. Watch for more whittling around the corners.

Then, there was the illegal-immigration bill, which by some measures is even worse than Arizona’s: it’s now against the law for you to knowingly rent an apartment or even give a ride to an undocumented alien, and schools are responsible for documenting the immigration status of their students and their parents. Not that it will stand a chance in federal court, but for now, thousands of Alabamians are doing backflips because they think they finally have a way to legally shit on brown people again.

But the real humdinger, the real ace in the hole, the ne plus ultra of Republican hypocrisy, the one that takes it all is the attempt by Jefferson County to get the authority to set its own taxes. See, in order to maintain a good bidness environment, individual counties can’t set their own taxes or rates; the state legislature has to grant them the authority to do so. One more reason the state Constitution of 1901 could stand to see the wrong end of a paper shredder.

The bill went before the Legislature. Beason used a Senatorial privilege to block the bill, as any Senator can do for a bill affecting his local district. There was begging and wheedling and warnings of doom, but he held firm, and the legislative session expired without granting the tax rights to Jefferson County.

Why is this important? Well, as has been famously documented elsewhere, Jefferson County got utterly bank-raped in the financial crisis of 2008. J.P. Morgan Chase convinced the county that they could finance operations with an increasingly baroque series of financial instruments, and when they imploded, so did the county’s finances. They are now facing bankruptcy. And to make matters worse, a state court invalidated the county’s occupational tax, leaving them $75 million in the hole. The home rule bill was an attempt to come up with a tax structure to try to make up $50 million of the shortfall.

And Scott Beason, friend of small government, promptly used the power of the state to prevent a local government from having control over its own taxes. All in the name of lower taxes. He suggested the country use its cash reserve instead – the same cash reserve that the county is holding as an emergency backstop now that the financial shenanigans of the previous county government (and of Wall Street) have left the county unable to raise money in the bond market or secure loans.

The result? 32-hour workweeks for county employees. Hundreds of layoffs. Traffic accidents now turned over solely to the state troopers – themselves so badly funded that a few years ago, only six units worked the entire state during the night hours. And God alone knows what will happen the next time a major tornado tears through the area.

Meanwhile, the rest of the state’s tax structure remains as lopsidedly regressive as ever. The state can expect to run low on money for some time to come – with property values depressed, the already-weak property tax won’t be bringing in much. Income tax isn’t particularly reliable when people don’t have jobs. Only the sales tax chugs along, and at close to 10% in most areas – including on sales of food and medicine – it tends mainly to make a bad financial situation worse. And the average resident of Jefferson County, making $30,000 a year, has now saved a whopping $34 thanks to Beason’s valiant stand.

So there it is. This is the GOP vision for Alabama. And, by extension, for America. They’re already talking up Scott Beason for a run at governor, or the Senate. He’s got time. He’s only 41 years old.

And that’s the funny part. Because I know him. Not well, and not for years, but when he was in third grade, I was temporarily promoted out of first and into his class for most of the school year.

I was way smarter than him in 1978, too.