the bone conductor

and honestly, it drives me crazy that a black member of the media would even bring this kind of shit up. there’s still plenty of actual racially-motivated double-standards being perpetrated, both in the coverage of the league and the way it operates; using this kind of crap as an example just kills your credibility. here’s a constant perception that the league has an image problem - despite record sales, attendance, etc., - because of the overtly-obvious hip hop/thug image some of the players have that a few white guys in a few news rooms just can’t seem to get past.

it’s okay in the nfl, of course. in the nfl you can take drugs, cause a shooting riot in a vegas strip club, have half the team arrested in the course of a season (hello cincinatti), and that’s okay. no one worries about the sponsors abandoning the league: exactly the opposite in fact. hell, in hockey, guys fight every night, but that’s okay too, because those are white guys and we know they’re okay. but in the nba, an accidental elbow during a game (not even called a foul 5 years ago) is now an ejection and a suspension, and an off court altercation or run in with the law, guilty or not, convicted or not, will cost a player a 10th of the season and their salary, at the very least. because we can’t let those thugs get out of control and ruin the game (and scare the sponsors)!

anyway. first off, i agree that bird has done a terrible job overall as general manager, and if he wasn’t god of indiana basketball from his college days, and larry legend from the nba (aka the hick from salt lick, as he called himself) he’d probably already be out of a job (although with the job some other gms have done over the years you never know… elgin baylor, a brilliant player and all around class guy by all accounts, was just awful for the clippers for years, for instance, before the team finally kind of turned it around at least for a few years. to be fair, the clippers have one of the cheapest and worst owners in sports, but that’s another story. and don’t get me started on larry brown, who absolutely did one of the worst coaching jobs in sports history with his brief tenure with the knicks before thomas came on board. it turns out, constantly pouting while you attack your players to the press isn’t super effective, coaching-wise.

but even without all the extremely embarrassing and absurd off the court drama that thomas and the knicks have been involved in (and even here, the comparisons are pretty unbalanced; you could talk about the trail blazers from a few seasons ago (aka the jail blazers) and their insistence on doing things like getting busted every other week for having an ounce of weed wrapped in foil in someone’s pocket and trying to get through a metal detector at the airport (brilliant!) in that class maybe, but that’s about it, as far as basketball is concerned anyway. football, now, that’s a different matter, as already mentioned), the difference between he and bird is a) thomas is the coach - when bird was the coach for 3 seasons, the pacers were an elite team every year, and he took them to the finals his last season before following through on his promise to only coach three years to avoid burnout, basically kicking himself upstairs at that point, more or less - as well as the general manager, and thomas has been simply, almost uniformly, horrendous in both aspects. he’s crippled the team for years with a series of signings and trades that, in most fantasy leagues, probably wouldn’t have even been allowed because they were so terrible, moves that gave his team an outrageously high salary while destroying their chances to get out from under them by making them long term deals for players who either can’t play, never could play, won’t play for thomas, or all of the above. the bottom line is he has *actively* destroyed the on-the-court product; if he hadn’t the other stuff would be news, but thomas would have at least as many defenders as antagonists, because it’s sports, and if you win people just don’t care that much about the rest of it. even now just about everyone will give thomas credit for making some very good choices in the draft over the years, consistently finding talented players. it’s not that the knicks are terrible, it’s that they don’t even compete half the time, and because of the just completely absurd deals that thomas has handed out, it’s not likely to change any time soon. comparing that to what bird has done in indy is just stupid. also, you know… it turns out thomas works for the new york knicks. the media scrutiny and pressure there, remarkably, are just a little higher than they might be in indianapolis. go figure.

and for the record, i’ve never liked bird, think he was just a little over-rated as a player - not a lot, just a leetle bit though (heretical as that will sound to about 99% of nba pundits), and i think if you want to talk about some racist things in the nba, maybe you could bring up how all of the white guys on the team from boston back in the 80’s have all ended up with coaching general manager gigs, despite at least two of them clearly not knowing what the hell they are doing (i’m talking about you, mchale) while a guy like kareem abdul jabbar, who is extraordinarily intelligent - at least as smart as anyone unfortunate enough to be reading this, certainly - had as much impact on the game as anyone, and oh yeah, holds the all-time record for scoring, is in the top three in just about every category there is, won a record 6 mvps (bird won 3), and 6 championship rings (twice as many as bird or his ex-celtic cohorts managed), couldn’t buy a coaching gig until the lakers threw him a bone and made him a consultant assistant assistant to help with their big guys. that’s maybe the most extreme example, but not the only one.

the ironic thing here, as well, is mr. jackson neglecting to mention that the same thomas once said of the same bird, back when they were playing against each other (and thomas’ team consistently being on the losing end) that “if he was black he’d be just another player.” which is clearly absurd, although again, back then, with most white sports fans still getting used to rooting for the black guys that had “taken over the league” and the boston-centric east coast media fawning all over bird, there may have been just a grain of truth (see: over-rated as a player, very slightly, once again).

this is pretty cool too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

really, i just liked that line. (obviously my whole “use caps and actual punctuation” thing has gone by the board here. good riddance.) it’s from a new yorker review of the macbeth production that is apparently kicking everyone’s ass in the most positive manner imaginable. and, you know, yay patrick stewart. that much talent should mandate constant, deafening applause in pretty much any context. back in the mid-90’s, living in north beach with the girlfriend (now the wife, oddly enough), said sigoth/gf/spousal unit to be had to endure TNG being broadcast twice a day in syndication; each time slot was showing episodes in their original braodcast order, but about 2 years apart. she became thoroughly smitten with the dashing captain and his “tea, earl gray, hot” sexiness. and i couldn’t even begin to wonder why.

this is so unexpectedly awesome it comepletely made my day:

on the plus side, i managed to get html::mason working on apache2/modperl2 on my mac laptop. now, i have to figure out why, exactly. of course the first code sample i cut and pasted from the mason docs didn’t work, because of course it references a method that has been renamed in apache2. so that’s fun. mason docs: as screwed up as i remember them. and i have an interview at 3pm tomorrow (yes, sunday) and i just remembered that god damn daylight savings crap kicks in tomorrow again. dear time-fuckers: we have electricity now. we can make lights go on and off when we need to. stop playing with the damn time. if you’re going to get cute with the clocks, let’s move to a 30 hour day and stop fucking around. 20 hours to get stuff done, and then 10 whole hours of sleep. what’s not to like? sure, we lose a day and a half from a week, but on the plus side we could start the week on tuesday afternoon. again: what’s not to like there?

i need some new music.

I think I spend too much time yelling at invisible people.

I don’t really have anything to add to that. Although maybe it would be wiser to wait until someone actually hires me before advertising that particular, uh… non-clinically-crazy-type, harmless and quirky in an amusing kind of way, thing… that I kind of, you know, got goin’… there.

Anyway, I just checked, any my wisdom is 8, so I might as well run with it.

Which reminds me, of course, of how surprisingly sad I am that it took his dying to make me realize how much I really owe to Gary Gygax. That Tycho kid at Penny-Arcade said it better (naturally, although I comfort myself with the knowledge that he has been practicing a bit more regularly than I have for a good long while now. That, and whiskey, is what I comfort myself with, technically), although he’s all young and stuff. I was 12 or 13, already a compulsive reader of sci-fi and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and most anything in the middle, having recently read TLTR for the first time - man, I was ripe for the plucking. My brother brought home the original rules set booklets (pretty sure there were three of them) from the hobby shop at the mall, Eldritch Wizardy (Baba Yaga’s Hut!) and the like, and some dice and some character sheets… and plucked I was, like a god damn E-string on Les Claypool’s bass. Or, more accurately for the time, Geddy Lee’s bass. I’d use some of the hardware from my first drum kit to help set up the play area, using the snare stand to hold the DM’s Guide for instance. That was really part of the awesomeness, setting up to play the game, building the perfect play area that 3 or 4 friends could sit around until 5 am, eating Ding Dongs and Cheetos and listening to Moving Pictures, and rocking the fire giant king’s face, getting all Vorpal on some dark elf’s ass.

By the time we were 16 or 17 and driving and stuff, we’d started making our own games, combining the overall depth and feel of AD&D with the combat system from DragonQuest and some stuff stolen from Champions, plus whatever comic book stuff we were reading then. But, you know, at a certain point when you’re 17 and have a license and, even better, another license with a somewhat different, more advantageous birthday on it (*cough*) there’s only so many nights you can devote to that. Plus we realized we were having more fun designing the rule sets and campaigns and characters than we were actually playing the game, which had already delivered a grievous injury to our enthusiasm by the time college, and everyone splitting up all over the place, killed it altogether. And, you know, since I’m ancient and stuff, I probably don’t need to mention that this was about a millenia before anything like Baldur’s Gate or NWN or any of that stuff was available (although conan on the apple ][ ruled so hard).

I still have my dice, and a few figurines, although I think I left my original set of the AD&D books at jorm’s place when we tried (with a remarkable lack of success, although the fried chicken was tasty) to play a module a few years ago. I can see the newer set of books on the shelf from here though; I picked them up when they came out a few years ago, even though I haven’t played since (outside of pc games, I mean). I guess it means that much to me, it was that important to me. How thoroughly goofy. Anyway, thanks, Mr. Gygax. Thanks for all of it.

I’ll deal with you invisible bitches later.

it’s almost midnight on a standard issue wednesday night. that means it’s time to finally find out, once and for all, which is better: a fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich, or a grilled cheese with bacon sandwich.

obviously, science demands rigorous testing here. if i survive… well, we’ll slather that bridge with bacon fat when we come to it.

from the AP -

“After an Oval Office meeting Tuesday with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Bush said the OPEC countries should understand the consequences of high energy prices. Bush said it’s a “mistake to have your biggest customers’ economies slowing down as a result of higher energy prices.”"

…which are largely a result of regional instability, which are largely a result of a lunatic middle-east “policy” and an indefensible 3 trillion dollar disaster of a war. We’re burning $12 billion a MONTH on that little war of choice, there… that probably isn’t really helping. But sure, blame it on the greedy towelheads. I’m sure there’s still that invincibly ignorant 25% of the country that will buy it, and those folks seem to be the only ones that count.

Extra points for the creepiness factor, but that’s just from the stop-reading-my-mind! perspective, which, apparently, everyone doesn’t share. Freaks.