Long Story Short

You would think that the whole Disney experience would be the farthest imaginable from being my kind of thing. But two days in the Anaheim part of the land of Mouse, as it turns out, just wasn’t enough. So we bought passes and will be headed back before long.

I think the thing I enjoyed most was California Adventure. After all this time, to have a completely new Disney experience…well, for a number of reasons, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t hurt that it comes with a roller coaster that is basically a railgun – no foreplay, no clack-clack-clack up the hill, just linear induction and POW, you’re going 60 miles an hour uphill, at night, surrounded by the lights of their boardwalk replica and with a pretty commanding view for as long as you can hold your head over to watch without getting whiplash.

I’ll tell you this, though: I could go the rest of my life without getting up at 4 AM to make a flight.

Yeah, it’s kind of a show.

It’s difficult to escape the sense that the Nobel committee really has it in for George W. Bush, given the recent run of votes. Carter, Gore, and now Obama – and wouldn’t you hate to be the guy who gets jerked out of bed by a phone call at 4 AM saying “The boss just won a Nobel prize. We need a speech in time for the morning shows.”

The unkind thing would be to point out that if the situation were reversed, and Bush were the one who got the inexplicable award, his side would be out there screaming “SUCK IT LIBRULS” instead of sitting there scratching their heads in sheepish embarrassment. Instead, I think the thing to point out is that since the first prize in 1901, Americans have won twenty-three Nobel Peace Prizes. Which, I would like to think, says something about our character as a nation and our aspirations for the world.

Also, Eric Bickel will probably have a stroke on the air today.

Out of Town Again

So one of my wife’s college friends – a trombone player, the most noble of all the low brass – is doing a big fundraiser bike ride this week. It’s a fundraiser for the Arthritis Foundation, which for obvious reasons is near and dear to my heart – and my dad’s name is actually on her fundraising as her honoree.

I haven’t said too much about it, mostly I guess because it seems like a very Vanderbilt thing to have somebody else do your hundreds-of-miles fundraising bike ride for you, but also because the old man is where I get my whole “ahhh I don’t need people making a fuss over me” from and I guess that sort of spilled over. But in case I forget, because you know I will — Molly, thank you. Very much.

We are going down to wave her across the finish line, which just happens to involve going to see the Mouse, so I will be behind the Orange curtain for the weekend. You can follow our exploits via the usual Tumblr site, as I still haven’t figured out a way to blog from the iPhone that doesn’t make me want to throw it through the window. (Not that other phones are any better, as you still need a typeable keyboard to really do anything, but holy smokes does that new Android-based Moto look incredible or what? Finally, somebody’s out there pushing Apple, and a good thing too, because you know RIM and Microsoft aren’t gonna do it…)

A Barren Source of Amusement

Tomorrow night is the debut of the UFL. The what? Yes, the United Football League, a 4-team league playing a six game season to be telecast on Versus and HDNet, this October and November.

If you don’t have HD, you don’t have HDNet. If you have DirecTV, you don’t have Versus, which DirecTV has dropped in a dispute with Comcast saying they don’t want to pay for “basically a paid programming and infomercial channel with occasional sporting events of interest”. (Harsh.) So there’s a very strong possibility that the TV ratings will be abysmal. In addition, the San Francisco-based “California Redwoods” are the only team playing all three home games in the same stadium – the “New York Sentinels” will play one home game in Connecticut, one in Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and one in the new Mets stadium in Queens, while the “Las Vegas” team plays one in Los Angeles and the “Florida” team plays two in Orlando and one in Tampa. So it’s going to be tricky to actually go out and see the teams in person. If there’s precious little TV and multiple stadiums happening, who exactly is going to be seeing this?

John Clayton has it right: this is a soft launch to get infrastructure in place with an eye toward 2010 and 2011. In 2010, unless the NFL comes to a new labor agreement, there will be an uncapped year which should set the personnel situation in the league on puree – and in 2011, if the NFL has not come to a labor agreement, there will almost certainly be a lockout, giving the UFL the chance to pick up premium talent.

This sort of shit comes along every four or five years – somebody thinks that they can start a second league and carve out a niche. The WFL in the mid-1970s (one and a half years), the USFL in the mid-80s (three years), the NFL’s own World League of American Football in the early 90s (two years in the US, then another ten or so exclusively in Europe), the CFL’s expansion into the United States in the mid-90s (two years), the XFL in 2001 (one famously mocked year) – and now, with the UFL starting up, there are no less than three other entities purporting to play spring football in 2010 (including one group ludicrously claiming to be reviving the USFL).

Professional football isn’t like hockey or baseball – there is no tradition of a professional developmental league. There has been overflow to the CFL for decades, and the Arena Football League caught some of that as well from the late 80s on – but the CFL had the advantage of a whole nation to itself, and the Arena League only had to fill the lower bowl of the typical urban multipurpose arena rather than turn out possibly tens of thousands of fans. And even so, the Arena League didn’t survive the onset of the current recession.

The big catch, though, is that there’s already a long established developmental league for professional football – it’s called the NCAA, and for over a hundred years it’s filled dozens of stadiums every Saturday in the fall with fans a thousand times more passionate than any American minor league has ever managed. The UFL’s not competing with the NFL – they’re competing with the NFL plus Cal, Stanford, San Jose State, Nevada, UNLV, Florida, Florida State, Miami, Central Florida, South Florida, Rutgers, Syracuse and Notre Dame*, just to name the obvious. Are there people with enough attention span for pro football, college football, AND the UFL? Probably, but how many?

Finally, the UFL is playing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night has become one of ESPN’s feature games in college ball, and while minor games are also played on Friday, the consensus is that Friday belongs to high school ball – so much that the NFL is forbidden by law from playing or broadcasting games within 75 miles of a high school game on Friday from September to mid-December.

SO…are there people who have the time to pay attention AND will do so in preference to other games AND have the resources and willingness to either buy tickets or to seek out Versus and HDNet telecasts? And are there enough of them to make the UFL a going concern long enough to attempt to capitalize on a labor explosion that may never take place?

Ax me. –NO.

It was different for the AFL. They came along at a time when the NFL had only a dozen teams, with several markets large enough to sustain a second entrant (New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area), football-mad parts of the world with no NFL presence (Buffalo, Texas, Florida), and only one national television outlet (CBS – at a time when teams largely sold their own television rights individually). There weren’t five channels in existence, let alone five showing NFL action (CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL Network). In short, the market for professional football was nowhere near the saturation point it is now, with 32 teams and two games a week in prime time.

This is one time where you look at the graveyard of the last 35 years and have to face the honest-to-God free-market truth: if there were a way to make money off a second professional football league, somebody would have done it by now.

* My understanding is that ABC Sports considers New York City to be a Notre Dame market for purposes of regional telecasts. May be true, maybe not, but the New York market was indisputably involved in the use of “Fighting Irish” as a nickname and the development of the tradition of “subway alumni”.

Hear and obey

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: Verizon sucks. Yes, much has been made of the fact that they have coverage “everywhere” (patently not true), but this is largely offset by a number of factors: mainly that they’re a CDMA/EV-DO carrier, which means shorter battery life, a smaller selection of devices, and an almost total inability to easily switch carriers or roam abroad (no buying that Chinatown phone and popping your SIM in it with the big red V). And to make matters worse, they are notorious for making asinine decisions (disabling Wi-Fi on their handsets, forcing their own standardized interface in place of the manufacturers, replacing Java J2ME compatibility with the laughable BREW standard) and worst of all, taking every opportunity to nickel-and-dime you for things like transferring the photos off the phone. If you want your mom to have a nice reliable phone to make calls on, sure, get her the freebie on Verizon, but if you want to *do* anything with your smartphone, run like hell and stay there.

Verizon Wireless was formed by the merger of GTE, Ameritch, Bell Atlantic and a couple other nubs who bet their early digital cellular on CDMA, and their setup has always been exactly what you’d expect from a Baby Bell: you’re incredibly privileged just to be on our network, so you’ll shut up and pay what we want from you and take what we give you. For crying out loud, even the biggest control freaks in the industry eventually set up an app store and a developer model and made it possible to record your own ringtones. If you’re going to be tighter than Apple, you’d damn well be able to create a user experience that makes the lame to walk, the blind to see, and restores the virginity of Stanfurd Dollies.

To date, Verizon’s flagship smartphone was the Blackberry Storm, a device so shudderingly godawful that Stephen Fry – who is a complete slave to every new smartphone that comes down the line, the man once travelled with SEVEN iPhones – gave it a half-star and heaped opprobrium on it. But today comes the announcement that Verizon will be offering Android phones – as in the Google phone OS, as in the first thing to legitimately challenge the iPhone’s crown as King Of All Smartphones.

Couple of possibilities here.

One is that this really is the rapture. Google phone on Verizon, complete with Google Voice out of the box as the default system, completely open to apps and modification, fully-featured and able to go anywhere Verizon has a signal – which, as old analog spectrum gets repurposed, gets better all the time. The other possibility is that Verizon continues with its efforts to get a nickel every time you touch the phone, imposes its own interface, charges you extra to access GPS and Wi-Fi, and basically makes a mockery of Google’s promises about an “open platform.”

The wild card in all this, of course, is LTE, the 4G standard that Verizon and AT&T are both moving toward. With the two main carriers migrating to an interoperable network for the first time, it will finally be conceivable to easily move between them with the same equipment. Which, in theory, should make life a lot more interesting – not to mention better – for the wireless consumer.

And to cap it all off, the FCC is explicitly committing themselves to network neutrality – which has already paid dividends, as AT&T has today opened their 3G network to VoIP traffic. Skype without Wi-Fi, anyone? It’s not much, but based on today, it’s possible that mobile tech in the United States is starting to nudge ever so slightly into the 21st century. Not a minute too soon either.

You gotta have *A* quarterback…

…and not a team in our household has one.

Vandy returned 18 starters, but Larry Smith – who had one start before this year – is struggling. And Cal’s opponents are stacking eight and nine in the box to stuff the run, but Kevin Riley – well, as one uncharitable blog commenter put it, “couldn’t hit the broad side of his mother.” As for the Redskins…well, they’re beyond help at this point, and there’s a real possibility of blood in the streets if they don’t put down the Bucs tomorrow.

Tedford, Johnson, Zorn, Cerrato and Snyder…fuck you all for making me think about claiming the Crimson Tide again.