the bone conductor

a draw-er, that is to say; a thing that you draw towards you, so to speak. anyway, in said thing was some stuff from long enough ago that i got all ben kenobi for a minute. “now that’s not a name that i’ve heard in a long time. a long time.” by the way, why did ben kenobi age approximately 52 years in the time it took luke to hit 20? han solo called him a fossil, after he shot greedo in the nuts. first. he went from strapping jedi battle stud to a guy who looks like he’s been reading racing forms in florida since the nixon years, and all before luke hit late adolescency and started whining about how bitchin it would be if his adoptive parents were just brutally murdered and out of the fucking way already. “christ, again with the converters? the droids can’t…? oh, all right, but i HATE YOU and my REAL DAD LOVES ME!” ahahahahaha!

anyway, here’s why: ben kenobi: hillbilly meth lab “old wizard” extraordinaire. it all makes sense, doesn’t it? the sand people are obviously speed freak customers, wondering what the FUCK is the holdup already and can i just get my FUCKING SHIT man? ben, all holed up in a cave in the middle of the desert - or, what we like to call “anyplace in california farther than 20 minutes from downtown” - rambling incoherently and dealing in clearly stolen appliances while his place is surrounded by screeching, spastic, hideous, threatening, yet ultimately retarded shitheads… this seems obvious to me. then he lies to the cops about being some kind of fence for illegal electronics, walks into a bar, starts talking to a huge hippie about smuggling stolen goods, and then suddenly freaks out and cuts the arm off the first guy he sees . c’mon.

any. way. i was looking through this drawer, and i found a bunch of old role playing character sheets and maps (hand-drawn, of course) and various other semi-humiliating paraphernalia: crude sketches, incoherent (and illegible) story ideas and character studies, that kind of thing. but it’s where i found that stuff that caught my attention; it was in a folder i’d titled, pompously enough, “idea incubator,” which i certainly stole from someone. the folder itself is a “pee-chee all season portfolio”, one of those yellow-orangy things with the various sporting activities portrayed on the covers that were ubiquitous back when i was in high school, all of 23 years ago. man. anyway, i was struck that even in the mid-80s, it was surprising that every single athelete portrayed in every single sport was white. white in that 50’s white kind of way, too. and then, i remembered the 80’s. the backlash over political correctness, which boiled down to “what do you mean i can’t be a rascist misanthropic asshole out loud anymore?” hell, the entire idea that the only reason someone wouldn’t say degenerate things in public was purely for appearances sake, and not because, you know, saying things like that indicates a probably toxic level of moronicosity, is pretty apalling when you think about it.

so don’t. trust me on this. just pretend it was all thriller and synchronicity, leg warmers and baggy neon pullovers. it’s better for everyone that way.

i’m not sure what i did to piss crom off - maybe it’s the muttering “crom” all the time thing - but the last two weeks have been pretty obnoxious. on the plus side, i’m working again, which is nice. although i’ve got this stupid javascript/jsp issue that i really should have done by tomorrow, except a) everyone who lives here that isn’t feline has picked up some kind of cold/flu thing in the last week or so, and b) it’s currently my turn at the moment. temperature at 100.5 last time i checked, so that’s not too bad. not doing much for the productivity though. plus i’m flying solo for the next couple days, starting tonight. so it looks like we’re in for a fun couple of days at least here. and taking days off the first couple of weeks on the job seems iffy. i remembered yesrerday i haven’t even told them yet about taking that week in may off.

and you know, the whole appeal of crom is that the cranky son of a bitch doesn’t listen to a damn thing anyone says anyway. so what the fuck?

what the situation calls for is, thus, fairly obvious: i need to watch a hitchcock movie. and i haven’t seen “rope” in a long time. and the bad guy is kind of the anti-jimmy stewart, like his evil twin or something, which i think adds something to an already fine feature (see: hitchcock). and, serendipitously enough (i hope that’s a word. it should be, anyway) i have on my dvr one “rope” directed by alfred hitchcock.

see what happens? i get a job and everything goes right to hell. on the other hand, if i could get lottery tickets delivered while watching “rope,” i’m pretty sure that would solve all of my problems.

no wonder people just pirate shit, if this is the “good” alternative. what a joke. what a sloppy, awkward, unintuitive, backwards-ass stupid, DRM-ed up the bunghole joke. as i say this i’m setting up another p2p client. fuck you, apple.

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).

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.

Damn hippies, slouching along towards Ragnarok with their heads in their asses and their little special pipes and beads and beanbags slouching along with them in a sort of high-speed stop-motion animation, a staggering, spasmodic, semi-ambulent sprint towards conflagration and wonderful, delicious doom.

this has been sitting in my drafts queue for a while now; i can’t imagine why…

apparently the line btween absurd and brutal degeneracy hadn’t been well enough defined. i think we can all thank sonic for illuminating that line like a fucking laser beam in a coal mine. hey, look, we took what might be a decent sandwich and put it on a… HOT DOG BUN. and we’re calling it the extra-long sandwich thing! brilliant! because a hot dog bun is kind of long! sure, we could actually buy some real fucking bread to make a sandwich with, but why do that when we already had all these hot dog buns laying around? plus, if you eat at sonic you’re already used to shovelling shit directly into your mouth via a rusty, diseased spoon-ish object that you might have made out of your own hard, pure dumbassedness.

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.

seems i’m going to have to get used to using the keyboard again. there was a time when such a thing held a certain amount of novelty, believe it or not. although my primary affection will always lay with the beautiful manual typewriters of old, i still yearn for the simplicity and space age ease of use that came with the mac plus with the extra external floppy drive, which i needed forthe ~300k that word 3.0 used, leaving me most of the disk for my files and gibberings and such.

come here so i can hit you with my cane.

anyway, need to get this typing thing back to where it was. i find that at some point in the past few years i’ve managed to learn to touch type, more or less. i mean, why be picky about the number of fingers actually used to type? the important thing is now i can spit out typos faster than ever before. usually you would have to have received at some point in the past, possibly due to a horrendous crash or an industrial accident involving robots and time travel, some really expensive implants and a good deal of training to be able to generate this high-speed brand of wild incompetence.

so, i’ve got that going for me.