Are my eyes really blue?

Christmas in 1988 really started the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when I heard Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for the first time while driving to a math tournament. I was a ringer – despite the fact that I was in Trig/PreCalc in 11th grade, I had been entered for the Algebra II competition. I didn’t normally do math, as I had no aptitude for it, and the math team wouldn’t normally have had me, but things were desperate and they were reduced to borrowing from the Scholar’s Bowl team. Which was sort of akin to Billy Graham borrowing from the Hell’s Angels.

Things really kicked into high gear when I got the ring. My class ring arrived the first week of December. White gold, 10K, fake aquamarine, and “1990” – a magical date, a number to conjure with, a deadline with the promise of better days ahead. When I wore it out at night, and the starlight hit it just so, all the hope and potential of an unlimited future was clearly visible at the bottom of that synthetic gemstone.

“Forever Young” and “Photograph” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” were our Christmas carols. I was 16, I had a reasonably viable car, I had my crew, I had a starting spot (alternate captain!) and a trophy to defend, I had a name and a nickname and a callsign and a growing reputation as an over-caffeinated psycho with a vicious wit and some serious social defects, because they hadn’t standardized the diagnosis of Asperger’s back then. And the world was just waiting for me to own it.

To be honest, the future wasn’t all that unlimited. In a lot of ways, it was badly limited by my own lack of imagination (what person, given unlimited power to travel through time and space, would carry out all his adventures within a 40-mile circle?) and there were practical considerations – I really didn’t have a future as Alabama’s quarterback, for instance. I say that because as I look at things now, there may not be as much unlimited future potential as there was twenty years ago – but who’s to say it was so unlimited then? Or that it’s so limited now?

The big difference is that I now live in the future. Don’t believe me? Do the list. Device in my pocket the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a thousand songs and a mobile phone and instant communication with “E Mail” and all the world’s knowledge to hand. Living in Silicon Valley. In California. Six-foot blonde girlfriend wife. NASA in my backyard, futuristic dirigible overhead, honeymoon in Edinburgh and vacation in Paris, listen to radio from London and Washington DC in real time, and – how crazy future-unlimited is this for a kid from rural Alabama? – Black President.

The future really is now. And it’s just waiting to be pwned.

It was a really, really different time. For one thing, it was the last time I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas down South – and both apart from my new girlfriend, who has already demonstrated whatever is the female equivalent of “balls the size of church bells” by moving to the Washington DC area a month after September 11, when anthrax was still a going concern and guys with M4 rifles still patrolled the airports. I clearly remember walking around the Riverchase Galleria with all its security measures and wondering if Al-Qaeda really had designs on trying to donk off a bunch of hicks grasping for bargains. The fact that I would even consider a possibility of foreign terrorist attack on Ala-freakin’-Bama should tell you what a different era it was.

(more after the jump)

Continue reading “Ghost of Christmas Past, part 1 of n: 2001”

No, seriously, this is a test of Drivel running under Ubuntu. I sort of have in the back of my head that if anything goes awry with my MacBook to the point I can no longer use it, I will splash out on a Dell Inspiron Mini9 running Ubuntu Netbook Remix – the Dell looks easiest to open up and upgrade, the Linux seems the easiest to handle (compared to something like Linpus Lite or whatever), the reviews all seem positive, the build options are flexible and I can get $100 credit with my leftover AmEx membership reward points.
The big thing right now (and honestly, this post is me thinking out loud) is not “what do I need a laptop for” but “what do I need a laptop for that an iPhone cannot do?” The biggest thing, obviously, is text entry. I can get my mail, surf the web, check my RSS feeds, diddle about with Facebook and Twitter and WIkipedia, all sorts of stuff – hell, I can even stream Absolute Radio now, even though it would kill my battery – but the two big things a laptop can do that the iPhone can’t are videoconferencing (via Skype) and long-form text entry (I wouldn’t want to write anything much over a Twitter post with the iPhone, let alone a thousand-word blog post). Plus, let’s be honest, anything on the web looks better at 1024×600 than at 480×320. Firefox 3, all the usual plug-ins and codecs, Zimbra (yes, my new job uses Zimbra for its collaborative groupware)…well, there you have it. Like it or not, there are some tasks that the smartphone is not yet up to, even the likes of the iPhone or the G1.
Of course, much depends on how long this machine here lasts, and when (if ever!) the Powers That Be from my first California job come looking for it again ;]

First off, NBC commits to nothing but reality programming in the 8 PM hour and now Jay Leno at 10 PM five nights a week?

What you’re saying is that the network of LA Law, Homicide, ER, The West Wing – they’re going to only 5 hours of weeknight primetime that MAY contain scripted programming? I mean, assume they’re going to shuffle around the comedy block, that’s 2 hours right there. Assume that some version of Law & Order will stick around, that’s 1 hour, assume that Heroes isn’t getting the gas pipe, that’s another hour…

Seriously, this is the plan? Extend late night into prime time and hope for the best? I knew Jeff Zucker didn’t have the brains God gave a cockroach, but it’s not the sort of thing you expect to see someone flaunt. Plus it’s not like Heroes hasn’t gone completely suckadoodledoo, because seriously, I think they’ve replaced the showrunner with a chimp or something.

I have more personal stuff to blog about, but it’ll be along later.

I guess I have to say something about alma mater. I never expected, after the disaster that was California football in 2007, that I would replicate the same experience with Vanderbilt, of all teams, in 2008. Five straight to open the season, a couple of high-profile victories, an unprecedented national ranking and all kinds of attention at 5-0, and then a sudden and inexorable collapse leading to a loss over the underdog arch-rival and a final record of 6-6. But there you have it. The same team that owned Thursday nights, the team that took down Steve Spurrier in week 2 and got Auburn’s offensive coordinator fired within 48 hours of the loss – that team shat the bed against Mississippi State and Duke and Tennessee and Wake Forest and almost managed to piss away a 21-point halftime lead over Kentucky.

I know it’s meant to be some sort of breakthrough, our first bowl game in 26 years, but it’s 6-6. It’s one whole win more than we’ve managed countless times since 1990. It’s a team that by rights should be sitting on 8 or 9 wins – hell, in theory we should have beaten everyone bar Georgia and Florida and be ticketed for New Years’ Day, and we beat two teams that probably will play on January 1. And for those six wins, it looks increasingly likely that Vanderbilt’s bowl trip won’t even take them out of 615, let alone the state of Tennessee.

So yeah, dynamite, blah blah. It doesn’t feel like much of a winning season, because it’s not – yet. In fact, despite the bowl berth, the odds strongly favor Vandy posting their 26th consecutive losing season. And ultimately, that’s the reason I can’t get cised: we haven’t turned the corner, not by a long shot, and next year is going to tell a lot about what this program actually has.

God knows I have, in my time, said some things that an objective observer would classify as vain, arrogant, perhaps a touch egotistical. However, what I am about to write may genuinely be the most outrageously vain, arrogant, egotistical, megalomaniacal thing I’ve ever put to print.

Nevertheless…onward.

Continue reading “Going for Broke”

When I was a kid, the season from Thanksgiving to Christmas was usually cold, rainy, foggy, and kind of dreary to look at. Everything was brown and gray, all the leaves were out of the trees and covering the ground, water dripping off the branches…in a way, it’s incredibly beautiful, but it isn’t hard to visualize how it could quickly turn depressing as hell. And did. And as a kid, you’d turn on the TV in December and see things like the Rose Bowl or the parade or something from Disneyland, and everything was clear and bright and sunny and green and lush. And there were palm trees. It was like another world. Something amazing and exotic and so, so much cooler than what was there in front of me.

Yesterday, I drove in a slow rain to the airport, past barren trees and muddy yards. I got on an airplane and flew back here. And this morning, I got up late, went down to the car about 10 AM, and went for a drive. Sonny and Sam on the satellite radio. Sunroof open, windows down, cool breeze and bright morning sun shining down. Green on the hills, palms swaying in the breeze down around Sunnyvale…

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the strangest feeling that something’s not quite right when I look in the mirror. Something has changed, and I can’t quite put my finger on what. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s got something to do with the idea of what it means to finally, genuinely be a Californian.

In any event, I made it. I survived the week, I returned in one piece, I’ve had sleep and coffee. It’s 1 PM, Sunday November 29, 2008. Ladies and gentlemen…welcome to Christmas. =)

…yes, back to the ancestral land next week for Thanksgiving. The good news is that thanks to iPhone Software Update 2.2, I can now update my podcast collection on the road, which means I can go literally weeks without needing to connect the phone to anything but a power outlet. The bad news is that I cannot churn out 800-word posts on an iPhone. (OK, may not be bad news. Election season is over – your boy has nothing to offer the blogosphere but cheap zingers and football rage.)

So there may not be much here for a while. However, if you want to keep track of the fun, you can check out the ancillary feed from Tumblr, which will have, you guessed it, cheap zings and random pix from the land of sinkin’ spells and casserole. Just bookmark http://scalawag.tumblr.com and wait for the preposterous fun to roll in. I knew I had a reason for keeping that account open.

With every passing day I give thanks that the only people on my side of the family who even know the definition of blog are my double second cousin and his telepathic waitress wife. I think I might have some ‘splainin to do otherwise. I mean, anybody who knows me can tell who this is, but I’ve gone to reasonable lengths to try to scrub it up a little (and there may be more in future).

Because he is the mother-swingin’ MAN, as proven empirically by Life Magazine.

You wanna talk about king of the 1970s…