i would have guessed that the chances of roger ebert saying “The only rating system that makes any sense is the Little Man of the San Franciscio Chronicle…” was only slightly greater than the chances of being eaten alive by ice-wombats on the way home from work. perhaps i’d better get me some ice-wombat repellant (IWR by its militarty acronym… but then you knew that, of course).
i’m not gonna go into any detail; if you don’t know about it (and you shouldn’t), or care about it (lord, get help) then you don’t need yet another propogator of links to the same story you’ve seen all over the damn place anyway.
all i want to say is: violet blue vs xeni or the rest of her pseudo-nerd posse at that site. you know the one, is the highest if high-sterical situations. in a best case scenario all of those people will soon see their self-importance reach critical mass and spontaneously detonate into a lovely cloud of atomized constituent parts: hack “journalism,” crypto-yuppie-nee-hipster brand name obsessiveness, and a debilitating infatuation with one’s own place in the heirarchy of cool.
although when i was on the well way back in the day, cory seemed a nice enough guy. just to be fair.
anyway. hi. lar. i. ous.
because if you do you are almost certainly dead fucking wrong, and quite possibly an idiot besides. there are as many examples as there are relationships, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on from the inside is usually impossible. from the outside? forget about it. who knows why people do things? and, of vastly more importance, what the hell business is it of random hypocritical strangers eager to indulge in some easy self-righteous condemnation, to pass judgement? and yes, hypocrites. anyone who castigates anyone else’s reasoning or motivations or whatever as far as their relationships are involved is a hypocrite, period. (of course we’re talking about situations where everyone involved is a consenting adult, which in this case specifically i think we can all agree is certainly the case; the absurd rush to an ignorant judgement seems to mostly involve WHY one or another of the parties is consenting to be a party to the relationship at all.) the louder and more indignant the castigations, the more assured the hypocrisy. there are so many examples of this dynamic, so many instances of someone publically decrying the lack of moral fortitude and/or personal dignity required to be as fine an example of a human being as the person doing the judging, that finding any number of examples to illustrate this dynamic presents zero challenge to anyone actually interested in things like honesty and dignity and the importance of conducting one’s self in an appropriate manner. which, of course, almost no one is, if the typical inane, brutally stupid reaction of the nattering classes and the bloggy clowns is any indication.
it’s none of your fucking business, so keep your nose out of it, moron. if you want to attack the governor’s own blatantly self-serving hypocrisy in going after “sex-rings” in the first place and then indulging himself, fine. in my opinion the mistake was the first move and not the second - again, we’re not talking about women being forced into slavery because they chose the wrong people to smuggle them across the border, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or any number of real, horrific, indefensible crimes of a similar nature that should be stomped right off the face of the earth - we’re talking about consenting adults. if the governor or your neighbor or your high school civics teacher wants to pay another consenting adult - man, woman, in between, whatever, for sex, so what?
you know, here’s a newsflash: puritanism sucks. it’s a dead end, culturally, civically, legally, period. it’s like continually insisting that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow because YOU really REALLY think it should. and you almost certainly think that because someone told you to think that. and that someone either a) has a vested interest in making you believe it, b) is clinically insane, or the most likely scenario: c) all of the above. then - and i really think this is the attractive part for the kind of people we’re discussing here - it’s time to punish punish punish! time to punish people for noticing that lunatic wishing in the face of vast amounts of undeniable evidence to the contrary, still did not come to pass. again. but hey, check back tomorrow. just don’t talk about it or mention it to the wrong people, because then it’s stake burning season. again.
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).
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.
no word on whether or not there is a correlation between the invisible man in the sky fixation and some other prevalent belief, uh, systems. although there is also evidence that people don’t know what the fuck they believe.
the scandal isn’t that a ref is betting on games, including games he worked; the scandal is NO ONE COULD TELL. obviously, even if he tried not to, it would be difficult to have something riding on a game you’re involved in and not at least subconsciously make a few more calls (or non-calls) than maybe you would usually, but given the general “quality” of nba officiating, there’s no way anyone could look at any of his games and say “well of course, that’s why there’s a critical call right there that ALL THREE refs missed! that’s why there’s a lunatic and/or “star” call on the next play, with ALL THREE refs looking right at it and no one correcting the call!”
dear whoring-selves-with-hyper-self-righteousness-media,
please. shut the fuck up. the nba isn’t going to suffer any backlash - read again, ZERO response - from the fans over the wildly overblown referee gambling scandal. apparently the only people who thought we lived in some kind of wonderful over the rainbow, oompa-loompa infested fantasy land were sportswriters, the various paid punditry who have an official job description that reads: “bitch about absurd things as if the world is ending tomorrow, and do it better than the other station so people notice and we get paid,” and some overwound league officials. no one else, with the exception of the extremely small minority of sports fans who like to tie their own sense of self-worth to the goings on of millionaire strangers, thought it was impossible, or even particularly unlikely, that human beings would suddenly stop being human because david fucking stern said so. no one else thinks the league needs to attain a completely frigid, flawless, tedious perfection to survive, or succeed. the vast majoirty of us, i would wager (even now), are content to know that they are games, and in the end, if a ref blows a game out of incompetence or good old american venality, why should i care? unless i can make myself feel better about my own pathetically wretched existence by loudly and perpetually declaiming my own moral superiority and the obvious need for punishment, for branding, for excommunicating and expelling all those of lesser stuff, who fall when tempted. Or maybe jump with both feet.
i don’t even blame the refs for this, really. the league needs to leave the game alone for a few years, let the rules settle down a little, and let the refs talk to the players and vice versa without getting all worked up about control issues or respecting the law or whatever the fuck it is that stern thinks he’s accomplishing with his gestapo-light routine for the officials. (”it’s not a matter of fairness, it’s a matter of correctness,” indeed. what kind of degenerate sociopathic lunatic would spout something so ridiculous? about a GAME that is in the end made up of rules to prevent anyone from gaining an unfair advantage and to make the games as enjoyable as possible to watch, no less. it’s like shooting yourself in the foot and complaining that you need a bigger gun. anyway.)
also, joey crawford got rooked. tim duncan is a giant whiny bitch, and he was certainly doing things on the sideline like a petulant 3 year old trying to see what he can get away with (something i’m an expert in at the moment, i can assure you). i’m glad crawford tossed him for it.