Are my eyes really blue?

I didn’t have a job the summer between college and grad school. I was busy swapping out all my undergrad stuff for Vandy-issue black and gold – that is, when I wasn’t watching the World Cup or trying out my new Power Mac 6100…or going to Barons games.

It was the perfect storm. I was 22, I was fixated on all things sports, and my best friend from high school had a dad in local government in Hoover – right where the Birmingham Barons played. Which means that for an entire summer, I had premium seating to watch rookie Baron right fielder Michael Jordan.

There are a couple of things people don’t realize about that team and that season:

1) The Hoover Met, in 1994, was very nearly an un-leavable yard. In the pre-steroid age, a classic round-symmetric park was a tough enough thing to hit out of without being positioned with the prevailing wind blowing in.

2) The 1993 Barons won the Southern League pennant going away – and more or less the entire roster got called up to triple-A Nashville. So what rolled into Birmingham in April of 1994 was, essentially, a single-A ballclub plus a three-time NBA champion off-guard.

There’s no real way to dress up a .202 batting average, but the three total home runs don’t look as bad in retrospect. The thing that really stands out, though, are 50 RBI – and a team-leading 30 steals. And the guy I watched from behind the first-base bullpen didn’t look like he was going anything less than all-out. This wasn’t a guy on an extended fantasy-camp outing, this was a guy with something to prove to himself.

I was more than thrilled to have the Bulls knock off the hated Lakers in ’91, but I was rooting hard for Portland in ’92 and Phoenix in ’93, so I wasn’t really a Jordan fan by any stretch of the imagination. But after 1994, I respected the hell out of him.

All through 1993, you could feel things changing. January – Democratic President for the first time since I was in third grade. February – moved on to my fifth roommate in three years in undergrad. March – 13 inches of snow and preachers on the radio trying to assure their listeners that the blizzard was not God’s judgement. April – my first grad school official visit, to Emory (how different would things have been had I been apprenticed to Abramowitz?) and in May – the delivery of the 1993 Saturn SC2, aquamarine, that would eventually become Danny and would someday finish its career parked on a side street in Silicon Valley. But I digress.

June was change, but the wrong kind – I was back to the produce cooler. Yup, three years of undergrad at what was allegedly the finest institution of higher learning in the state and I was right back to doing the same job I did in the summer between tenth and eleventh grade. I didn’t have a lick of sense, of course; I should have been scrounging for a temp agency that could give me a nice air-conditioned berth in front of a PC (yes, folks, in 1993 I still had yet to become a Mac user) but instead I was right back to stacking bananas – at least we no longer shrink-wrapped a dozen cases of iceberg lettuce every morning.

This was the year that I went all-in on the NFL preseason for the first time. My collection of hats and jerseys and Nikes was starting to hit critical mass, and a family vacation to the Smokies was spent perusing NFL preview magazines and looking in on any and every preseason game ESPN aired. My beloved Redskins were looking at their first season After Gibbs, but nobody was worried – Richie Pettitbone, master of defense, was taking the controls and everything looked to be A-OK.*

I guess I never really paid attention to the NFL. The first Super Bowl I remember being cognizant of was when the Redskins beat the Dolphins, but I don’t remember watching it – that didn’t happen until the Super Bowl Shuffle-era Chicago Bears made a big enough splash that even a skinny nerd knew who the Fridge was (even if I had no idea what position he played – confusion made worse whenever Ditka lined him up as a running back).

The really funny thing was that this was right about the time that the Indigo Girls album “Rites of Passage” finally showed up in my collection. I was a little behind, obviously, but I was banging that tape through the Walkman on a loop for most of the summer, largely because “Ghost” was evocative – for the obvious reasons, but ones made worse by the fact that I was sending letters back and forth with the girl who would become Horrible. Yes, I was still technically with She Whose Name We Do Not Speak (and I was on that tip YEARS before J. K. Rowling), but She was working on the summer theater program in town and busily laying pipe with a stagehand while I was feeling guilty about how good it felt to get a letter back, so in retrospect I regret none of my conduct. Obviously I regret ever getting entangled with Horrible, but that’s a whole separate decade of sending a therapist’s kids to Harvard on a jewel-encrusted camel.

August 1993 was the first time it really occurred to me that you could go up in the mountains, someplace green and leafy, and it wasn’t nearly as godawful hot. It was a revelation almost as transforming as the 2002 realization that you could do that at sea level if only you went to Silicon Valley…

So there it is. Calm before the storm, more or less, or the lull waiting for the regeneration to finish maybe. By August, I would be out of the produce and working for the Dean’s office, ramping up for senior year – which was more eventful than the previous three years combined, but that’s another story altogether.

* A-OK = 4-12. Disastrous. Of course, the Skins turned in the same record this past season, so you can see what kind of decade(s) we’ve had…

I handed over my netbook to my father-in-law this week. As a retired 31-year IBM lifer, he has the time, the skill set, and the patience to mess around with it, which puts him three ahead of me.

What I found in the six months I donked around with it was that in the grand scheme of things, I rarely used it for anything but web surfing. I never found a really satisfactory blogging client for it, which was one of the big incentives to have it, and the advent of FaceTime has severely undercut the argument for needing the webcam for long-distance teleconferencing (which i literally used maybe once the whole time I had it).

The bigger problem, though, it that it was just weak. 1 GB of RAM being pushed by a 1.6 Ghz Atom processor isn’t exactly crazy horsepower. Video playback was damn near worthless; I tried but it took some seriously messed-up configuring to get Hulu to work – even when I booted back into XP, what I got was more slideshow than video. It was adequate at video playback for local files, but not in a compelling fashion, especially given the limited battery life.

What I realize now is that in every way other than text entry, for my needs and purposes, the iPhone 4 basically kicks the shit out of the typical netbook. Maybe this is because the netbook was largely underpowered when it first hit in 2008 and hasn’t really moved very far since. Maybe it’s just asking too much to compromise the hardware and still get a viable desktop-OS experience. Maybe this explains why Apple scaled the iPhone OS up instead of scaling Mac OS X down. And most of all, maybe this explains why everybody’s talking up Android tablets as the iPad killer, and ignoring existing devices that cost half as much.

Ultimately, though, the iPad isn’t getting it done for me either. It delivers improvements in text input, and the screen is far easier to handle books, PDF and video on, but those aren’t enough to rate having to carry a bag. I might consider the new Kindle for travel – I’m far more likely to read and listen to podcasts than I am to try to watch my own video content – and if I lost my job tomorrow, I would certainly look at an iPad rather than a new MacBook, now that we have the known good Mac mini upstairs.

I think what the iPad really is, in the end, is the first salvo of the notebook-replacement wars. There were tablets before, and netbooks, but the iPad is Apple’s way of hitting the beach with “we’re going to forcibly change the paradigm of portable computing.” The same way there were computers with USB ports before, or MP3 players before, or smartphones before, Apple’s going to burn a lot of money and advertising to push a new technology in a way that makes people want to try it out. The early adopters sink a ton of cash and get abused mercilessly in the press, the geek elite rolls its eyes endlessly (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”) and a rev later, everybody else is building an “iPad killer.”

And when the day comes, I’ll probably give them a look too. Android 3 on a reasonably good hardware tablet might just be an iPad-breaker; the licensing model for a Wi-Fi tablet is a lot more promising than having to deal with carrier bullshit. I’m sure the usual suspects have something on the way; if Dell is pushing a 5″ tablet-with-phone now, I’m sure they’ll have their “iPad killer” out by Christmas, and of course there’s the Cisco Cius next year.

But for now, the shortcomings of the iPhone 4 aren’t enough to validate the monetary outlay to cover them. It’s not worth $200 for a bigger screen to look at text, let alone $500 and up. Back to “wait-and-see” – and, of course, trucking home with the work laptop every night for blogging…

So BYU reacts to its Pac-10 snub by taking its ball and leaving the MWC to go…independent. Well, not entirely. They’re back to the old WAC for everything but football, but in football, they’re going to try to go it alone. This is actually not a bad move for them, as they can play a bunch of WAC-level teams, add in a few mildly improved competitors, and have a Boise State-type situation almost every year where they can keep themselves in the BCS picture with a minimum of effort.

I can’t think Boise is thrilled with how things worked out – the two biggest-ticket teams in the MWC have flown the coop, leaving them in a conference that’s not that much better than what they left. However, the MWC tonight has backfilled their empties with Fresno State and Nevada, two programs that while hardly national powers are still teams you don’t want to find on your Homecoming docket. Add them to a conference with Boise State and TCU, plus the don’t-look-past-them of Air Force and the not-to-be-taken-lightly of Colorado State and San Diego State – hell’s bells, the new-look Mountain West is at least as legit as the Big East or ACC, and far more so than the forthcoming Texas Ten, when it comes time to hand out BCS berths.

This is a good move. It sends BYU out to play in the traffic, which is fine by me, and reorganizes what’s left of the MWC and WAC into one pretty damn capable football conference. The flip side is that the WAC no longer has enough teams to exist as a football league – they have six, and the rules say you need eight. I fully expect a daylight raid on Conference USA any minute now, which will in turn raid the Sun Belt, which will in turn try to make some sort of arrangement (does Georgia State need a conference affiliation?) and POP goes the weasel. The part of the weasel, as always, will be played by the BCS.

Created by Oatmeal

I could pass. I’m white, male, straight, of more or less average appearance (and with something approaching a mutant power of perception filtering to disappear in a crowd). If I just kept my mouth shut and went right along, there would be nothing at all to distinguish me from the vast army of middle-class hicks that populate the Hookworm Belt one step up from the trailer park. Hell, I did pass. I spent most of eighth grade slouching and slurring and using words like “hisself” that I knew goddamn well weren’t within a thousand miles of correct English. And I did it to try to get by. 1986 was the worst year of my life that didn’t involve death.

If I were willing to just switch off my brain, I could go along and get along just fine and nobody would be the wiser. I don’t have to be the kind of weirdo I was in elementary school, or the outcast I was in undergrad. I was a minority – not a patch on people with different skin color or sexuality, but definitely not normal – from the worst place in America not to be normal. But I could get by without a peep.

All I have to do is acquiesce.

When in fact, I want just the opposite. I want to rage out. I want my team to impose its views on the minority. I want Tennessee fans to be too terrified to set foot on the BART to Berkeley and I want people scared to put “Yes On 8” stickers on their car for fear of the eggs and rocks and I want listening to AM talk radio to be regarded as a deviance on par with kiddie porn. But that doesn’t happen, because we have to be tolerant of those who have different beliefs and we have to respect diversity even when it wants to round us up and put us in camps.

Just once, before I die, I’d love to see a time when bigotry, ignorance and just plain asshole stop being treated as valid points of view and start being regarded for what they are – deviant behavior. This is why I make a piss-poor liberal, and why I know the Alabama DNA is too tightly woven around my brainstem to ever be truly overcome. I don’t want to escape, I don’t want my freedom, I don’t want peace and quiet, I don’t want to just walk away – I want revenge.

Am I the only person who sees purple spots and has to go outside and walk around for 20 minutes when the thought occurs that your freedoms are subject to veto by retarded hicks and their amen corner on TV?

…is because his opponent is certifiably, clinically, batshit loonball crazy.

Otherwise, in every meaningful way, the only reason Harry Reid is not a total pussy is because to call him such would be to sully the good name of pussy.

If you want to know why the Democrats have struggled for two years, it’s because they have a worthless sack of jelly as the Senate Majority Leader. Hopefully someday he’ll be able to get his testicles out of the blind trust.

“Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore.”

Safari 5 has support for “extensions” – something Firefox has had forever and which Chrome jumped on right away. These are what we used to call “plug-ins” – bringing additional functionality to your browser. Unlike the old days, though, when you needed plugins for a slew of different media formats, these are mainly to add things like a GMail Inbox indicator or an ad blocker or an “Add To Amazon Wish List” 1-click button.

And then there’s “Shut Up”, which is a plugin that uses common bits of HTML to know where to find comments on a website – and remove them from view.

I’ve been keeping a blog of some sort for over eleven years now. It’s bopped around different places, using different formats and things, but for the first five or six years – barring a six-month experiment with Blogger as the back end – I didn’t have comments available. In fact, of the blogs I read, some of the most critical once don’t have comments at all.

It’s a tough thing, comments. Occasionally, if things break just right, you have something like Deadspin Up! All Night, which for a while was the closest thing to the old Zone I’ve seen since (it spawned at least two other blogs just from like-minded groups of commenters on this one last post per day). Or EDSBS, which has long since stopped being a Florida football blog and turned into some sort of collective performance art. And supposedly Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has quite a well-curated comment section that actually brings something to the table.

And then, at the other end, there’s…well, everything else. The comments at al.com are pretty much rock bottom, and YouTube is right there alongside, but for the most part, venturing into the comment section of any major news website is a complete waste of time and may make you want to stick a gun in your mouth. Especially if you ever taught high school English. Hell, middle school English. I probably wouldn’t have comments if I had my druthers, but I can’t be arsed to figure out how to turn them off. Besides, it’s not really an issue for most individual bloggers.

Because here’s the thing: I’m basically standing on a platform I built myself (with help from my brother-in-law) and I’ve put up a body of work which I like to think reflects my knowledge, experience, and ruminations over a period of – gosh, four years or so now. It’s not particularly sharp, it’s not particularly insightful, and it probably doesn’t add too too much to the world’s storehouse of wisdom – but it’s mine, and I pretty much stand by it.

Here’s the thing, though: the opportunity cost of a blog is exactly zero relative to a comment. You need a computer and Internet access anyway, and Blogger and WordPress and Tumblr and TypePad Micro and Vox and Livejournal and I don’t know what else – they’re all free at the point of use. Basically, when you post a public comment on a blog, you’re saying “I am entitled to the use of your platform and bullhorn for my own opinion.” And for a personal blog which pretty much nobody reads, that’s fine. However, on bigger blogs or sites, it deteriorates rapidly – because given Internet access and practical anonymity, the average individual turns into a 14-year-old boy, with all the intelligence, wisdom, sensitivity and grammar that implies. The caliber of graffiti on the back wall of my high school was an order of magnitude smarter than the kind of bullshit that accompanies most any online news story, and God help you if you venture into the darker corners of the Internet.

I say that to say this: I think that for the most part, website comments are part and parcel of an extremely unfortunate trend of public life in this country. We have reached a point in this Year of Our Lord 2010 when we give everyone an equal right to be heard, irrespective of maturity, qualification, or even sanity. In the real world, if you’re parked at a stop sign and a crazed homeless person starts to crawl into your window screaming about Majestic-12 and the alien menace, do you enter into a discourse with him and try to reason with him and show him the flaws in his logic?

No. Hell no. You stomp the gas and lay a patch right through the intersection and peel out of there. If necessary, you whack him in the face with your coffee mug to make him let go of the window.

The problem is, on the internet, there’s an army of deranged nutters, and they’re everywhere. If you want to enter into a serious discussion on CNN.com, or ESPN, or (fill in literally ANY newspaper’s website), well, God bless you, but you’re not going to get it. You’re going to sink into a steady swamp of trolls, flamers, and outright morons who are still relying on that free AOL disk they got on a copy of George magazine.

We’ve made serious public discourse impossible in this country, because we’ve allowed everyone to play. You don’t have to be reasonable, you don’t have to be logical, you don’t even have to exist in the same reality as those of us who have green grass and blue skies in our world (well, at least in November and December). And for those of us who want public life to be carried on at a slightly more erudite level than a shit fight at the monkey house, we’ve been reduced to two and a half choices. We can either not go to that part of town at all, or we can go there with the windows rolled up and blacked out, resolutely staring forward and ignoring the bumping and banging outside.

Or you can lean over and punch your hanger-on in the face. The downside of that is that once you engage in the shit fight, the monkey invariably gets shit all over you.