Category: basketball

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Unrequired Reading: Nov. 3, 2006

Official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon & his brother Whit sacrifice themselves to The Guiding Light in order to chronicle the soap opera’s tie-in episode with Marvel Comics.

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Two tax articles from Slate: the continuing phenomenon of Bushenfreude — those who benefit from the Republican tax cuts but contribute to Democrat politicians, and Bono/U2’s decision to reduce its tax burden by moving its music publishing company out of Ireland:

“Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market … that’s a justice issue,” Bono said at a prayer breakfast attended by President Bush, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and various members of Congress earlier this year. Preaching this sort of thing has made Bono a perennial candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He continued:

Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents . . . that’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents . . . that’s a justice issue.

And relocating your business offshore in order to avoid paying taxes to the Republic of Ireland, where poverty is higher than in almost any other developed nation?

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Dan Drezner examines the importance of China in negotiations with North Korea. I believe I’ve said it before: When you manage to get the U.S., Russia, China and Japan on the same page against you, you have severely messed up.

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BLDGBLOG remains one of the most eerie/haunting sites out there. This post about offshore oil rigs proves my point.

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When we gaze into the Barack, does the Barack gaze back at us?

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In honor of the premiere of Borat, the UK press has been doing interest stories from Kazakhstan.

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Reason on misreading the Beats.

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I know enough small publicly-held company execs who would agree with this post: SOX sucks.

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It’s Ron-Ron’s world.

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And in honor of the NBA season kick-off (as it were): Kieran Darcy gives up on the Knicks, about 10 years after I did.

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The Living Thank You, Too!

Happy Day of the Dead, all you zombies and zombettes!

To commemorate the event, I was too exhausted this morning to write up more NBA previews, so the next update will be this evening. But I decided to make this blog easier for readers who don’t give a crap about the NBA (and the humorous takes Tom Spurgeon & I provide) by moving the hoops previews to a separate page!

So head over to the Official VM NBA Preview page to check out the new postings, and come back here for my other wacky ruminations. I promise to get a good Unrequired Reading together tomorrow morning!

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Goings On

Amy’s thinking of getting a Mini Cooper, so I took a look at them yesterday while she was getting her hair cut. They’re awfully neat cars and, if I wasn’t opposed to owning a car from a German company, I’d look at getting one for myself. Alas.

We got home and caught up with Sabrina (1954) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which remains the funniest movie I’ve seen this decade. I’d never seen Sabrina, and my only point of reference was hearing Mike & the Mad Dog decry the old version in favor of the contemporary edition. When one of them declared that Audrey Hepburn wasn’t that pretty, it became clear to me that all sports radio hosts are actually gay. In between movies, Amy put together an “avocado et crevettes” dish for me, similar to the one we had in Paris. Love is wonderful.

What’s not wonderful is the idea of a musical based on Bob Dylan’s songs. We caught a clip of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” the, um, Bob Dylan musical. On Broadway. No, seriously. It was on The Soup, and Amy & I just stared agog, like Beavis & Butthead during a bad video.

Fortunately, one of my favorite writers, David Gates, went to see the show, and wrote a column about it for Newsweek. He was even more perplexed than we were.

In other news, I’m headed off to San Antonio tonight for a pharma conference. This’ll be followed by a trip to Orlando next Sunday for another one, but that oughtta wrap up my business travel for the year, unless I make a short trip up to Toronto to visit some clients.

Starting tomorrow, if all goes well (as in, we get everything written and I’m able to get online at the hotel), I’ll begin posting the third annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview! Official VM bestest buddy Tom Spurgeon & I have divvied up the 30 squads and will be offering our jaundiced take on the NBA (with a couple of guest-contributors).

In honor of that, I present the man who got me to watch pro hoops regularly, when I was 14 or so: Patrick Ewing.

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Unrequired Reading

I promised some Unrequired Reading for a Friday morning, so here it is:

Jane Galt has a sad post about the economic destruction of Zimbabwae. There are some “interesting” comments after the post.

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Via Bookslut, a collection of covers from old Penguin and Pelican books.

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Ten YEARS of South Park?! Man, I’m getting old.

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It’s Ramadan. Don’t be a jerk.

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What’s organic?

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Mark Cuban talks balls.

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Ron Rosenbaum on William Kennedy, Hunter Thompson and the America’s Cup.

Bonus: Ron on the Dunkin Donuts Coffee Roll.

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Present success is no indication of future failure

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki tells us to take a chill pill over Airbus’ current struggles.

In 2003, Business Week declared that Boeing was “choking on Airbus’ fumes,” and warned that Boeing’s “slip to No. 2 could become permanent.”

The problem with such prognostications is that they infer basic truths about a company’s prospects from its short-term performance. In fact, present success is often determined as much by context and chance as by fundamental viability. This is particularly true of the aerospace industry, because success is heavily dependent on a small number of big gambles. If you bet right, you look like a genius for a few years, even if the success of your bet was due to factors out of your control.

In the first few seasons after Jason Kidd joined the Nets, he would have two- or three-week stretches of lights-out shooting, leading commentators and sportswriters to announce that Kidd had “turned the corner” and become a good shooter.

Unfortunately, Jason Kidd is a career 40% shooter. All the good runs have been balanced out by below-average runs, leaving him exactly where he’s been since the start of his career: hitting 40% of his shots.

It doesn’t mean he’s not one of the best point guards of the last 30 years; he is. He’s just not a good shooter, and statistical blips are just that.

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More posts about buildings and food

I came across BLDG BLOG yesterday, thanks to a link in the NY Observer. The most recent post, on the shortcomings of architectural criticism, is awfully read-worthy. It explores how an art form (and again, I’m using architecture as a stand-in for other art forms) can become too esoteric for its own good:

[S]trong and interesting architectural criticism is defined by the way you talk about architecture, not the buildings you choose to talk about.

In other words, fine: you can talk about Fumihiko Maki instead of, say, Half-Life, or Doom, or super-garages, but if you start citing Le Corbusier, or arguing about whether something is truly “parametric,” then you shouldn’t be surprised if anyone who’s not a grad student, studying with one of your friends at Columbia, puts the article down, gets in a car — and drives to the mall, riding that knotwork of self-intersecting crosstown flyovers and neo-Roman car parks that most architecture critics are too busy to consider analyzing.

All along, your non-Adorno-reading former subscriber will be interacting with, experiencing, and probably complaining about architecture — but you’ve missed a perfect chance to join in.

The mention of Adorno puts me in mind of the great essay, “Is Bad Writing Necessary?” which appeared in the late, lamented Lingua Franca a few years ago. (It took me a long time to find that article online after LF folded, but I dug it up on a Chinese site, cleaned up the typography, and saved it as a Word doc, which I present here.)

That essay explored the attraction of ‘esoteric writing’ of sorts, that use of academic jargon and deliberate obfuscation that (in my opinion) creates a closed, insulated circuit of theory that has little involvement in the real world. The writer contrasts this style of writing (as exemplified by Theodor Adorno) with the ‘windowpane’ style of George Orwell, which strove to be as unjargonistic as possible.

Even though I went to a theory-heavy undergrad institution, I ended up championing Orwell’s prose over the self-privileging of academic jargon (okay, maybe that should read, ‘Because I went to a . . .’). I understand that some concepts are awfully tricky and need plenty of work to explain, but if you can’t convey them to a reasonably intelligent person without resorting to a glossary of strange terminology, you’re probably just spinning your wheels.

(I’m not sure if the example of explaining the pick-and-roll to my wife this weekend applies, but that was an instance where, rather than resorting to basketball terminology, I used our salt and pepper shakers, a salad dressing bottle and a bottle-cap to demonstrate exactly what the p&r is. Then I explained to her how the Lakers’ terrible defensive rotation on the wing led to Tim Thomas rolling 20 feet for an unimpeded dunk.)

BLDG BLOG writer Geoff Manaugh also explores this idea of theory essentially having its head stuck up its ass:

First, early on, one of the panelists stated: “It’s not our job to say: ‘Gee, the new Home Depot sucks. . .'”

But of course it is!

That’s exactly your role; that’s exactly the built environment as it’s now experienced by the majority of the American public. “Architecture,” for most Americans, means Home Depot — not Mies Van Der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you’d have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan — or San Francisco, or Boston’s Back Bay.

You’d also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique — or celebrate — these buildings now popping up on every corner. If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey — citing Le Corbusier — then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night’s panelists.

Put simply, if everyday users of everyday architecture don’t realize that Home Depot, Best Buy, WalMart, even Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose, can be criticized — if people don’t realize that even suburbs and shopping malls and parking garages can be criticized — then you end up with the architectural situation we have today: low-quality, badly situated housing stock, illogically designed and full of uncomfortable amounts of excess closet space.

And no one says a thing.

I’m not sure why I’ve grown so interested in architecture and buildings in the last few years. Maybe it’s because of the sorta intersection of art, commerce, and real-world-ness (it’s a building). I should probably ruminate on that for a while.

Anyway, enjoy the article.

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We Like Jewish People! (or, Psychosemitic)

In today’s Washington Post, there’s an article about evangelical Christians who are becoming “philo-semitic”. While some of the people demonstrate a straight-up belief that Jews are the chosen people, I’ve been a little nervous about this trend for years now.

I guess it derives from my feeling uncomfortable with any religious group that links paradise with apocalypse. There’s a manic evangelical woman in my office who used to put all sorts of “literature” in my mail slot. Since it was a pretty clean ergonomic movement from the mail slot to the trash can, it was never a huge problem.

Then she e-mailed me an excerpt from The Omega Letter, explaining how the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was God’s revenge for the U.S. support for Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. I flipped out on her, as I predicted would happen last August. All this apocalypso gives me the Heebie-Jewbies:

Julie Galambush, a former American Baptist minister who converted to Judaism 11 years ago, has seen both sides of the divide. She said many Jews suspect that evangelicals’ support for Israel is rooted in a belief that the return of Jews to the promised land will trigger the Second Coming of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and mass conversion.

“That hope is felt and expressed by Christians as a kind, benevolent hope,” said Galambush, author of “The Reluctant Parting,” a new book on the Jewish roots of Christianity. “But believing that someday Jews will stop being Jews and become Christians is still a form of hoping that someday there will be no more Jews.”

Anyway, what I’m saying is, some evangelicals consider support of Jews just a necessary step in the Second Coming. I’m not saying they all feel this way, because it’d be unfair to characterize everydarnbody based solely on religion. But I’m glad that some — like the profiled Rev. Mooneyham — appear to have different motives for their “charity” for the Jews.

Still, the idea of bringing Russian Jews “home” ties into this idea of prophecy and Armageddon (for me), and this centering of the Jews with history and its end:

Jacques Berlinerblau, a visiting professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University, said the rise of philo-Semitism in the United States has led Jewish scholars to look back at previous periods of philo-Semitism, such as in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century. He said revisionists are increasingly challenging the standard “lachrymose version” of Jewish history, questioning whether persecution has been the norm and tolerance the exception, or vice versa.

Still, some Jews think that philo-Semitism is just the flip side of anti-Semitism.

“Both are Semitisms: That is, both install the Jews at the center of history. One regards this centrality positively, the other regards it negatively. But both are forms of obsession about the Jews,” said Leon Wieseltier, a Jewish scholar and literary editor of the New Republic.

Which, of course, brings me back to basketball. Last century, people joked about the eschatological evangelical beliefs of Sacramento’s power forward, Lawrence Funderburke. See, Lawrence had been making comments about how the world was going to end after 1999, but he’d also been holding out for a long-term contract, so the sportswriters had a pretty easy time goofing on him.

So ESPN writer Frank Hughes decided to interview Funderburke about it two days before this projected apocalypse:

Why not sign a one-year deal, or a half-year deal, get everything up front, live it up like a drunken banshee for the remainder of his days and just go nuts in that final game of games, the Kings-Seattle SuperSonics tilt on Dec. 29?

Hey, I realize the globe is about to blow a gasket, and in the larger scheme basketball does not really mean a whole lot since all life on this planet is about to end, but regardless, we’ve still got a job to do. Tip-off at 7:30.

So I go in to talk with Larry after a game the other day, completely prepared to listen to his prediction of Almighty destruction with a smirk on my face.

And guess what? The guy is very well spoken, very intelligent and makes some solid arguments. And after writing the column last week about what a farce some of the aspects of religion are in this league, it was actually refreshing to listen to a man who is so devoted to his beliefs and so willing to shamelessly stand up for them in the face of ridicule and adversity.

Most of Funderburke’s comments were prophecies about Israel weakening, imminent mega-destruction, and the Jews coming to accept that Jesus is the messiah, but he also said something that I found pretty touching:

“I don’t get caught up in the millennium, and I know that it is not going to happen around then. And I think a lot of people will point at Christians and say, ‘If it doesn’t happen, then they are all false prophecies and they are predicting all these things.’ [. . .]

“I live day to day, my life. If you look at Payne Stewart, if you look at John Kennedy, no one knows when The Lord is going to come for your individual life. The main thing is to be ready, make sure you have a personal relationship with Him. I don’t worry about that. I’ve always lived my life day by day. I can’t control the future. No man can. What I try to do is give to the Church, help people out, do all I can to follow Christ’s example. A lot of people kid me, a lot of people ask me questions about Y2K . . . but I tell them I don’t know.”

Apart from the passages about impending nuclear war, his sentiments were pretty close to the those of the Dalai Lama, who contended that the true cataclysm is within the human heart, and that every day can be the millennium for someone.

Have a happy agnostic valentine.