O-4-Rated

BRETT FAVRE IS NOT BIGGER THAN THE NFL.

Ideally, I would love to see him doused in worcestershire sauce and locked in a room with Michael Vick’s dogs. The decidedly unChristian part of me would love to see him take his first snap from scrimmage in an exhibition game and go down with two broken legs.

Brett Favre is no longer fit for purpose as an NFL quarterback – ask any Jets fan about the tail end of last season and then plug your ears – and the only reason we are afflicted with Hamlet-in-a-helmet is because the sports media cannot stop acting as if this is somehow a consequential bit of news. This is why I love the Redskins but truly despise the NFL.

I will stop beating this dead horse as soon as ESPN’s done fucking it…

Trouble

So the latest fashion among red-state limpdicks is apparently to stand around conspicuously close to Presidential events brandishing weapons, making much of the fact that they are within the letter of the law. This is basically the equivalent of the six-year-old who waves his hand in your face screaming “I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU! I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU!”

Personally, I don’t have a lot of trouble with the idea of firearms ownership in general. All mine are in the ancestral land rather than here, though, because quite frankly I don’t need them in a place where the majority of folks don’t want to shoot everyone like me. So what the hell is going on in these other places that people feel the need to suddenly just happen to exercise their rights in close proximity to an event that contains most of the things they oppose in one place?

If you remember my previous work, you know that there are essentially three political parties in this country: the Left, the Right, and the South. Until roughly 1964, these were conflated oddly, with most of the Left and the South under the umbrella of “Democrat” and most of the Right under the umbrella of “Republican.” The big shift was the move of the South from the “Democrat” label to the “Republican” from 1964-72, but also consequential was the shifting of everyone that fell under “Left” to the side of the Democrats. Don’t forget that in the Civil Rights era, a lot of the heavy lifting came from liberal Republicans in the Northeast (of the sort known in the early 80s as “Gypsy Moths”) working in concert with non-Southern Democrats. (This is also why the notion of “bipartisanship” is obsolete, with the ideologies having sorted pretty cleanly into two parties with little admixture outside of a few red-state Democrats – there’s a big difference between needing to rustle up 51 “Left” among both parties and having to get 60 Democrats, but that’s a tale for another time.)

In an amazing surprise,* there is a huge overlap between the most virulent health-reform opponents, the “Birthers,” and the population of aging rural Southern whites. This is a population whose doom is written clear as day: America is getting ever more non-white, the South is losing its influence over national politics, fewer than one American in five lives in a rural area, and they themselves – not to put too fine a point on it – are dying. As a cohort, the “South” is in its twilight; the people who voted reliably for Wallace, then Reagan, then both Bushes and finally Palin (note that the ever-so-shocking** “Don’t Blame Me” bumper stickers assert that the owner voted for “Sarah”, not “McCain) are seeing their world and society change around them – politically, culturally, the works – in ways that are insurmountable.

So those folks marching around with their Glocks and their M4-geries and ominous sign-waving about the “tree of liberty” aren’t just out there to decry “socialism” or try to scare people. They have the Southern disease, and are convinced that the world can be made to return to the way it was. They cannot succeed – ask King Canute about tides – but they can make things difficult along the way. After all, if you’re facing an existential crisis, you’ll do whatever it takes to rage against the dying of the light.

The problem is, the last time this particular cohort tried to make things difficult, 168 people died in Oklahoma City. After eight years when you could get bundled off by persons impersonating the Secret Service for having arrived at a rally with the wrong bumper sticker, I personally think that somebody needs to do a better job asserting that while an armed society is a polite society, a polite society frowns on continual public penis-waving. And if the Emily Post approach comes up short, well…the Feds have always got the hydrogen bomb.

(My actual thoughts on the forthcoming health care debacle will be coming along later.)

* WHOPPING GREAT HEAP O’ SARCASM WARNING

** WHOPPING GREAT HEAP O’ SARCASM WARNING PART DEUX ELECTRIC BOOGALEAUX

Not exactly what I had in mind…

…but word comes this morning from the mighty Orson Swindle at EDSBS that the Pac-10 has done a deal to put a team in the Alamo Bowl.

Now, I will leave it to my wife to lay out the merits of the Alamo Bowl (hint: if you’re experiencing bonding between the football players and the band geeks, your bowl may suck) but I am not sure that sending the #2 team to San Antonio is any great improvement. I had something in mind more like the Citrus Bowl or the Cotton Bowl or some such, not some indoor play-on-a-rug-on-ESPN-some-weeknight kind of bowl. If you’re just trading San Diego for San Antonio? Let me tell you something, there is nothing – NOTHING – in the entire state of Texas that should ever be seeded over San Diego. San Diego is a 1 seed. San Diego is the ’27 Yankees. Texas is the ’62 Mets.

The other problem is that it doesn’t improve the matchup – it’s still #2 Pac-10 vs #3 Big 12, which is a no-win situation. But then, the Holiday Bowl is going to be #3 Pac-10 vs #5 Big 12 now (Insight Bowl swooped in to geth #4 Big 12) which means that once again, Pac-10 teams will be playing down in all their bowls but one.

You’d almost think the Pac-10 didn’t acknowledge the existence of any bowl but the Rose Bowl…OH WAIT…

“You gotta fight the fire where the fire is, not where you are.”

So the other half of Team Black Swan had some interesting things to say about their voyage and how they got to where they are now. The notion that they wound up on what can charitably be thought of as a “deep cover embed” because it was the path of least resistance – well, it rings absolutely true. In my case, I went where the one job offer was after the great grad-school washout – and even if it meant moving to Washington DC (or thereabouts), I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I went. Even moving to Silicon Valley – well sure, I didn’t have a job, but I had money in the bank, a fiancee who already had a job, a guaranteed room at her folks’ house for as long as we needed it, and the firm conviction that sticking around would finish up with me in either Lorton or St Elizabeth’s. So going west wasn’t exactly a high-risk move, from a standpoint low on the Maslow hierarchy.

I guess all that is to say that speaking as a textbook Enneagram 6, I see absolutely nothing wrong in the logic of choosing the devil you know. Sure, the Ancestral Lands have their own problems, which are legion and show no sign of subsiding (when 2/3 of the population of the Ancestral Lands doesn’t firmly believe the President of the United States is an American citizen, they have problems) but part of growing up Black Swan is developing the skill set needed to survive in such an environment. The capstone of that skill set, of course, being the ability to make a sufficiently spectacular escape when the time comes.

2.0 also nails something I have thought about myself, and I quote: “it sometimes gets tiresome to be defined by things you most certainly are not. Having the chance to define yourself based on things that you are and things that you want to be – that’s where the action is.” I’m still working on that bit…especially the last bit, because the question of “where do you want to be in your life at 40?” is taking on what the Smashing Pumpkins called “the resolute urgency of now.” And having just dated myself horribly, I will wrap it for the night.

Except to reaffirm that yes, pimento cheese wears a helmet.

What the Pac-10 Needs To Do

Footbaw! Footbaw footbaw footbaw footbaw footbaw FOOTBAW!!

Footbaw.

The Pac-10 is in an odd spot. It has no conference title game, and doesn’t need one, because everyone plays everyone else. In addition, with only three conference games, you would think teams would be more anxious about getting gimmes, and yet Pac-10 teams tend to go out and get Big Televen or SEC opponents in those spots. I think a few years back USC’s three non-cons were Notre Dame, Arkansas and Va Tech. California seems to have a Big Ten opponent pretty much every year. And looking at last year’s bowl performance, it seems like things are working out, given that the Pac-10 teams in bowls all won.

And yet, the Pac-10 gets no respect on a national level, it seems. Pac-10 officiating is the joke of the NCAA – the inconsistency is a show, and they always seem to fluff things in full view of the entire country – and it seems like every time something’s gone awry with the BCS, it’s always at the expense of a Pac-10 team. So what can the Pac-10 do to get back to national prominence? They can fix their biggest problems, in no particular order:

1) THE TV PACKAGE SUCKS. When people complain about “East Coast Bias,” what they should be complaining about is the TV deal, because that’s how people become aware of teams. Look at the other schools…Notre Dame bought their own broadcast network in 1990. The Big Ten has its own cable channel. Literally every SEC game is being televised this year thanks to a huge deal with CBS and ESPN that will let the Southeastern Conference reach a bigger percentage of Americans than anybody since Miles Standish said “ok, time to get off the boat.”

But the Pac-10’s secondary deal (after ABC’s Game of the Week, usually in prime time) is with…drumroll…Fox Sports Net. The tertiary deal is with…Versus. VERSUS. The Pac-10’s third-biggest game of the week is being sandwiched in between bull riding and Tour de France reruns. Ask a hockey fan about Versus. Then plug your ears. Honestly, FSN is no better, because they’re showing the #2 game in prime time…ON THE WEST COAST. These games are kicking off at 10 PM in the East, where college fans who have been drinking for 14 hours already are almost completely unable to get stuck into another three and a half hours of action unless they are complete degenerates. And the people who vote in polls are a completely different sort of degenerate. If the Pac-10 is going to get back on top, the first thing to do is blow up the TV packages and, if necessary, take less money to get the games on a network that will take football seriously. NBC is in dire straits – Notre Dame only seems to get half above suckitude one year in four, the Arena League just bit the dust, NASCAR is on Sundays…they have plenty of time and nothing competing. Get on the horn and make a deal – a fourth place network can be had cheap. And from there, they can work on fixing the fact that…

2) THE BOWL PACKAGE SUCKS OUT LOUD. Pasadena, San Diego, El Paso (!?!?), Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego again. Those are the Pac-10 bowl tie-ins, and they’re not the sort of thing that’s going to make people back East sit up and say “let’s have a look at that,” because none of them are back East. A top-10 Cal team got my attention in 1991 because they went to the Citrus Bowl and gave Clemson the beatdown, so it’s not like those teams can’t travel. But consider this: if you finish 3rd or even 4th in the SEC or Big Ten, you’re going to be playing on New Year’s Day, thanks to tie-ins with the Citrus, Cotton and Outback bowls. How many times in the last ten years has a team that finished second in the Pac-10 and ranked in the top 10 nationally played their bowl game on a weeknight in San Diego a couple of days after Christmas? It is incumbent on the new Pac-10 commissioner to blow up the existing bowl tie-ins at the first opportunity and make some deals that will get the Pac-10 teams playing on January 1 where people can see them. Other than…

3) USC. Anytime somebody mentions Pac-10 football and “East Coast bias,” the simple retort is “USC.” Darlings of ESPN, voted national champions by the Associated Press in 2003 despite a third-place BCS finish (if the East Coast bias is so great, how come Auburn of the mighty SEC didn’t get a whiff of similar consideration the following year?), the Trojans are America’s Team in the eyes of the national press, with Pete Carroll as the second coming of Bear Bryant and the incumbent QB invariably becoming LA’s male answer to Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan. They are ubiquitous, they are inexorable, and they have basically sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the league.

This is the biggest problem the Pac-10 faces. For the last decade, the only way to keep USC out of the Rose Bowl has been to make it the national championship game and put somebody else in it…or put the national championship game somewhere else and put USC in it. Southern California has won the last seven Pac-10 titles in a row – read that sentence again – and despite sharing some of those, nobody else has taken their spot on Colorado Avenue on New Years’ morning. USC’s game is usually the Pac 10’s game of the week, which means they spend more time on ABC than those harpies on The View…at the expense of nine other teams. Not for nothing do certain members of the blogosphere refer to the conference as the “Pac-One.”

Unfortunately, it’s also the thing that the conference can do the least about, with one exception: the NCAA is combining their probes of the Reggie Bush and OJ Mayo recruiting scandals into one big super-probe of USC athletics. This is the exact sort of investigation that laid waste to Alabama football in the late 1990s, because there is nothing the NCAA loves more than to bust out the whoopin’ stick on a big-time program just to prove that they can and will. In Alabama’s case, despite no finding of lack of institutional control or individual culpability on the part of any university employee, the school was supposedly “staring down the barrel of the death penalty.” Which means that it is entirely possible that USC could be facing the risk of disproportionate punishment as well.

While the Pac-10 conference office doesn’t need to egg on the NCAA, they should resist the temptation to try to shield their cash cow from the wrath of the big bad bully from Indianapolis. I distinctly remember seeing Washington fans in the early 90s in their “Pac-9: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Put ‘Em On Probation” t-shirts, so it’s not like the league has gone out of its way to protect its heavy hitters in the past.

Long story short: there’s not that much that needs doing for the Pac-10 to climb the ranks again, but it’s going to take an active commitment on the part of the conference management to get there. There is absolutely no reason why a conference like the Big East should have an edge on the Pac-10, let alone a bunch of halfwits like the MWC or (gah!) the WAC, and it’s all because the previous administration thought that things were fine just as they were. But it’s time to adapt – and the schools are getting there, the conference just needs to catch up.

Forget it Jake…it’s Shermer.

RIP John Hughes, even if I never saw most of his pics until I was out of the demographic. The only one I saw somewhat contemporaneously was Pretty In Pink which I saw in March of ’87. Later, I managed to see The Breakfast Club (night before undergrad graduation) Sixteen Candles (grad school?) and of course Ferris, but the thing I always take away from his movies is that they somehow wound up with a happy ending. The only true-life finish that ever happened in a John Hughes movie was that Duckie answered the bell at prom time and got ditched for the preppy kid. And then of course they had to screw it up by throwing him a pneumatic blonde as a lovely parting gift.

Honestly, the only remotely accurate locker movie EVER is the best one ever made…Heathers.

Random Ruminations

* The great struggle of our time is Pre- versus Post-Enlightenment. The problem is that you cannot get the pre-Enlightenment true-believer to reply to post-Enlightenment stimuli (more crudely put, you can’t reason with the Taliban) which creates…issues, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama.

* Google’s Chrome OS (which I take to basically be Chrome browser + Google Gears + a Linux kernel and drivers enough to run netbook-grade hardware) is interesting to me because it threatens to make the netbook a net-book again. The One Laptop Per Child project produced the XO-1, which was sort of a proof of concept but never got to be as cheap as they hoped. However, it led to the likes of the Asus EEE and the current crop of netbooks, which are laptops. Small, cheap, weak laptops, but laptops nonetheless, with Windows (or similar), local storage with locally-installed binary applications, etc etc. Chrome threatens to get even leaner and lighter than that: imagine a machine which you turn on and get A Browser And That’s All. How long can you go in Just A Browser? Actually, pretty far, if you’re willing to do it all in the cloud – recall all the stuff on my previous List Of Google S, and consider that if you throw in Gears for offline mail handling and document composition, etc, you could actually get a hell of a lot done. And if all you need to handle is a browser, a TCP/IP stack, and drive a screen, keyboard and trackpad plus either Wi-Fi or WWAN or both, you eliminate the need for very much RAM or storage or most everything else.

* Which means that if you have an XO-1, you basically can have the Google netbook already – just open the browser and go to it. (God knows the Sugar interface is worthless for almost anything else.) This doctrine of just-enough-hardware-to-run-a-browser is pretty much the Palm Pre in a nutshell, too, and the iPhone and G1 aren’t far off. You could make it big enough to see, light enough to travel, sell out on battery life since you don’t need room for too many other components – hell, scale the iPod Touch up to 6×9 or so and you’d damn near have it. The implications for the local rumors du jour are left as an exercise for the reader.

* My friend is getting her sister back. This makes me happy.

* All you Freudians looking side-eye at my research on airsoft and Nerf guns: feck off.

* After twenty years with a bad knee and two years of post-surgery, I’m FINALLY getting around to rehabbing it. I also have a pass for the gym at my office, at long last. The goal, such as it is, is to try to get myself semi-healthy in short order. To be honest, I’d settle for being able to hike up the hill to the stadium without getting winded and to slim back down to a 36 waist for the first time in a decade or so. God knows I need a new pair of jeans anyway…

* I’m still getting by fine on my iPhone 3G, but I’m having the same trouble most smartphone owners have: if you *use* it as a smartphone, checking mail and reading RSS and surfing the web and listening to some music, it will not last a full day roaming around the city unless you turn off Wi-Fi, turn off 3G, turn off push notifications after dinnertime and use an iPod Shuffle to catch up on your three hours worth of podcasts. And even then, you’re coming back running awful light. Of course, your mileage may vary. You may travel with friends and be too polite to constantly check your phone during otherwise civilized conversation. =)

* From the Bureau of Ouch: this week’s featured Coca-Cola Championship match on Setanta is West Brom vs.Newcastle. That’ll leave a mark…

* I have two conflicting and irreconcilable impulses that run my life. One is a deep and compelling need to keep other people out of my S, and to stay out of their S. The other, apparently, is a deep and compelling need to be a stupendous badass and save the day. So the question is: how does a guy whose biggest need is not to be responsible for other people’s S wind up as an emergency responder – not only for his neighborhood but for his place of work? For that matter, how does such a person wind up making a decade’s career in TECH SUPPORT?

More tech punditry

Now things are getting interesting, with the news that Eric Schmidt is off the board at AAPL. Officially, it’s because things like Chrome and Android and the forthcoming netbook OS are moving Google into competition with Apple, and Schmidt has to recuse himself from so much as a result that he can no longer be an effective board member. Unofficially, the FCC probe into what’s happening with Google Voice on the iPhone is probably accelerating what was inevitable anyway.
First things first: nobody wants to separate carrier and service more than I do. We have a third-world mobile infrastructure in this country, and that’s an insult to the third world, which usually has a much more robust system than the US has. Part of the reason is because we have no interoperability between carriers – for the average non-techie consumer, the only way you can change carriers and keep your existing phone is to go from T-Mobile to AT&T after spending enough time/money with T-Mob that they will unlock your phone. If you get an unlocked phone or are willing to unlock it, you can go the other direction as well. You could kind of sort of go between Sprint and Verizon, maybe, but you need their help and consent since they register phones by ESN rather than SIM card. And you can’t go from AT&T or T-Mobile to Verizon or Sprint, because we have two technologically incompatible wireless systems in this country.
In developing the iPhone, Apple didn’t have a choice – as stated before, if you want a GSM phone that works in both frequency bands, your choice is AT&T, period. They did try some other things – home activation, for one – that gave some indication that it might be possible to change the way things are done. That went right away with the iPhone 3G, though, as did the pricing – the iPhone 3G had the same carrier subsidy as every other phone, because selling the phone at retail is financially uncompetitive when every other phone is $200 off with a 2-year contract.
For all intents and purposes, the iPhone is no different from any other smartphone on AT&T’s network, with one exception: Apple has control of the App Store. Which means that unlike the Blackberry, for instance, all apps come from one place and can be throttled as needed. Example: last year, a Slingbox client for the iPhone was produced. AT&T balked, changed their terms of service, and now the client only works on Wi-Fi. Not only was the Google Voice app rejected, but all third-party GV apps were yanked from the store at the same time. Apple doesn’t really have a motive for doing this, but AT&T has every incentive to shut off GV access, as it has the potential not only to turn AT&T into a dumb pipe carrier but to cut in on possibly the most lucrative thing AT&T has: text messaging.
See, SMS is part of the GSM standard. SMS messages are not data as such – they are piggybacked on the control channels for the GSM network. They’re freebies on signals that have to carry through anyway – which is why text messaging holds up in times and places where you can’t hold a phone call long enough to let it ring – but in the last couple of years, the cost has doubled to 20 cents a pop, sending OR receiving. Most carriers have covered it by saying “ALL messages are now the same, 20 cents” but the fact of the matter is that this is nearly the only place on Earth that charges on the send AND the receive, and raised the price of text messaging despite the complete absence of any technical requirement that would cost them more.
Google Voice has its own SMS.
Google Voice, in short, has the potential to reduce any cell carrier to a dumb pipe provider. Think AT&T wants that? Given that their network can’t handle the data traffic they have now?
God rest Deep Throat’s soul, he was right: follow the money.