Category: Sports

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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.

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Ho-ho!

Happy Chanukkah and Merry Christmas, dear readers! Sorry I didn’t post anything since before our French Quarter trip, but we’ve been pretty busy, and I don’t like writing on the WinXP machine that Amy’s parents own. I tried setting up a wifi network here with a wireless router from CompUSA, but their machine wouldn’t even start correctly when the thing was plugged in, so I gave up. Thanks, Mr. Gates!

As it turns out, one of the neighbors has a wifi network set up, which shocks me to no end. Since the neighbor would likely be just as shocked to find out that another person in the neighborhood is wifi-capable, he or she didn’t bother putting a password onto the network.

We spent last night visiting several of Amy’s relatives, then went to a family Christmas party. Unbeknownst to me, there was some sorta NBA draft lottery set up beforehand, and we’d all drawn names of other family members to a buy a present for.

Fortunately, Amy took care of my responsibilities on that one, but I was awfully puzzled when her aunt came up to me and thanked me for the gift.

What did I get, dear reader? Well, my Amazon wish list served up some interesting choices. In this case, Amy’s dad bought me a copy of Charles Burns’ Black Hole book. While it’s an amazing comic, I’m really hoping that none of the family flipped through it before wrapping it for me.

Before the party, as I mentioned, we visited some family members to exchange presents. I met one of them last March, when she was waiting for a diagnosis for a condition that turned out to be ALS. We hit it off last spring because she’s a big fan of the Hornets, and I can talk NBA with just about anyone.

She was pretty optimistic about the team’s chances this year, contending that a couple of trades and a high draft pick would bring the team on the road to respectability. On the way out of her house that evening, I said to Amy, “With all due respect, she’s going to get better before that misbegotten team does.”

Turns out she was right, and I was unfortunately wrong. The Hornets have been better than expected this season. Not playoff-worthy, but winning a fair share of games.

On the other hand, Joyce has deteriorated pretty badly, and now uses a keyboard-driven speech-box.

Her condition (and the team’s relocation to Oklahoma City) hasn’t stopped her from watching the squad, and we started “talking” about the team last night. Amy ventured the question, “Are you still waching the Hornets?” and Joyce spent a few moments keying away on the box with her stylus before, “THEY HAD A BIG LEAD LAST NIGHT BUT LOST TO THE BUCKS” came out.

“I saw the final score, but didn’t know they had a lead,” I told her.

“THEY PLAYED AGAINST BIG CAT LAST NIGHT.”

“Yeah, the Times-Pic played up the Mason-Magloire trade,” I said, smiling.

“THAT TRADE WAS DUMB.”

I mean, this woman’s trapped in a deteriorating body by this disease. She just asked us to turn off the Home Shopping Network’s cooking show because “IT MAKES ME WISH FOR FOOD.”

But here she is, conversing with me like we’re a couple of NBA lifers. Amy’s dad told me that she “shouts” at the TV during games still. We joked that there needs to be shortcut keys for “DEFENSE” and “REBOUND”.

Anyway, it’s time for yet more eating, here in Cajun country. Have a fun holiday, everybody.

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Can’t jump, etc.

Nice article on Slate about the idiocy in comparing every white basketball player to Larry Bird. Here’s a taste:

Want proof that getting compared to Bird is a one-way ticket to the Caucasian basketball graveyard? A list of players who’ve been identified as Bird-like reads like the roster of a CBA team sponsored by the KKK. There are the Dukies: Danny Ferry, Mike Dunleavy Jr., and Christian Laettner (according to Charles Barkley, “the only thing Christian Laettner has in common with Larry Bird is they both pee standing up”). There are the guys whose main qualification was playing college ball in the Midwest: Troy Murphy and Wally Szczerbiak (“a Larry Bird game, a Tom Cruise smile,” one scribe said). There’s the inexplicable: Australian Andrew Gaze. And the monstrously, hilariously inexplicable: center Eric Montross, whom Celtics exec M.L. Carr said was cut from the same cloth as the Birdman.

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Hoopage

Two neat basketball stories today. First, Chuck Klosterman wrote a neat piece on ESPN’s Page2 about how Phil Jackson will become a much better story once he’s gone through the abject failure of coaching the Lakers this year.

Americans don’t read very much, mostly because they don’t have to. But we still live in a staunchly literary world. We understand almost everything (and everyone) within the context of a narrative that’s written by circumstance and reality; each person’s history is a little story where they are the main character. As such, historical figures are remembered for the things they accomplish and the victories they win — if life were a movie, the collection of those achievements would comprise the plot. But people are always defined by their greatest failure. You learn very little about a man’s character from his success; truth exists only within adversity. And adversity is what Jackson needs to define himself as A Great Man; without it, he’s just a tall dude from Williston High School who won a lot of games with a lot of talent.

The other neat story? Why, it’s that Seattle Sonics center Reggie Evans missed a piece of the 3rd quarter of last night’s game against the Knicks because he was taking his drug test at halftime.

“I’ve been clean since I’ve been in the league, I’ve been clean since I’ve been in college, I’ve been clean since I’ve been in high school, middle school, elementary school,” Evans said. “I’m just cleaner than clean. I’m cleaner than Pine-Sol.”

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NBA 2005 Southeast Division Preview

by Tom Spurgeon

(Here endeth VM’s NBA week! Hope it didn’t hurt too much!)

Mostly Above the Halfway Point Division

Seattle Supersonics

Looking over Seattle’s 2005-2006 roster is like learning about the marriage of a couple you thought had broken up months ago. Last year’s experiment in having a bunch of free-agents on roster so that they’d play hard to garner a big pay day in free agency paid off really well — especially for the Sonics, as nobody wanted most of Seattle’s players despite the team’s very effective 2004-2005 season. My primary theory is that because they’re as physically unattractive as the 1986 Boston Celtics, people may expect more than even their division-winning season brought about. Or, alternatively, no one wants to break up this team before High Resolution becomes the sports-watching standard and every hoops fan in America gets to see this team and its unfortunate skin marks and tufts of hair in God’s format. My tertiary theory is simply no one has any idea who plays on Seattle sports teams.

Seattle also managed to retain the services of Jesus Shuttlesworth, perhaps the only perennial all-star and one-time film actor with star wattage so low he can be outshined charisma-wise by local WNBA players.

Predicted record: 50-32

* * *

Denver Nuggets

George Karl, with the shady, doughy appearance and split of a bad guy on the Superman television show (Dean Cain era), enjoys as his primary virtue the fact that he looks totally in charge. He’s the kind of guy you ask about sporting goods even though he’s just standing there in t-shirt and jeans, or that you keep your eye on in a bar to see if he’s messing with your drink order by a shake of his head in the bartender’s direction. Don’t laugh — in an era where coaches seem split between corporate nobodies and confused ex-players, this is a highly desirable skill. He’s a coach and he looks like a coach.

Unfortunately, unlike other evil genius icons such as Joe Paterno, James Lipton and Governor George Pataki, Karl has failed to flatter and/or bludgeon a specific fan base into loving him no matter what the exit polls and scoreboards say. Karl’s last prominent gig as a coach was leading the 2003 World Basketball tournament team to consecutive losses against Aquilonia and the Country of the Houyhnhnms. I think most basketball fans are just waiting for the Nuggets to lose a few dozen games so this can be spat back in Karl’s face. Okay, maybe that’s just me.

The Nuggets as a team are entirely too dependent on Carmelo Anthony’s unique physical balancing act: staying skinny enough to be efficient on offense and to dodge the occasional morning practice right cross from teammate Kenyon Martin No. 1, but not so skinny he caves in to a sudden on-court pang and eats Earl Boykins.

Predicted record: 49-33

* * *

Minnesota Timberwolves

The brief rise of the Minnesota Timberwolves a year or two ago was interesting for the unique public persona grafted upon noted post-rebound screamer Kevin Garnett, who joined the league as an 11-year-old white girl in 1982. Perhaps unique among all sports celebrities, Garnett had become saddled with an underachiever label that received consistent reinforcement through his own advertising appearances, including one in which a psychological projection of Garnett berates the real Garnett for his lack of post-season success, which one supposes was supposed to draw attention to the power forward’s high standards rather than a tendency to slip into dementia. The only thing that comes close in recent memory to Garnett’s self-sabotage through ad spot is Matthew McConaughey’s “Yep, I’m a good-looking, lightweight dumbass” cologne campaign. Thankfully, the only humiliations that Garnet suffers these days is that people seem to prefer using their remote control on the Black Eyed Peas by a ratio of 2000 airings to one, and, once again, on the court.

As for positives beyond their loudest star, the Timberwolves are no longer coached by a white guy named “Flip” and they’ve jettisoned their hateful old men — including Latrelle “The Provider” Sprewell and Sam “Magic Jeep” Cassell — for a few inoffensive younger types, something that worked really well for Cheers and not so well for that one iteration of Van Halen we’d all like to forget.

Predicted Record: 38-44

* * *

Portland Trailblazers

Unbeknownst to most people outside the Pacific Northwest, the Portland trailblazers are an experiment in community karma. As the city itself completes a 20-year renewal that has resulted in an entire metropolitan of art-loving, bike-riding, farmer’s market- attending, beautiful souls, the Trailblazers team has in return for a string of sell-outs that would make a Greek military historian take note absorbed the entire region’s bad impulses and, as a result, devolved into a one of those gangs from a Beach Party movie. After several years of resulting player malfeasance including re-enactments of the pot-suffused car-destroying joy ride from Fast Times at Ridgemont High on I-5, and a Warren Oates movie moment regarding a poor soul bred primarily for pit fighting (not Ruben Patterson), the nonsense has finally reached the coaching staff. Nate McMillan, the longtime Sonics icon who ended up the coach in Portland the same way a guy after his first fight with his high school sweetheart might end up married in Vegas, spent a portion of the off-season in some sort of bizarre legal tussle with a leftover assistant coach who claimed McMillan doesn’t really want them there. Worst episode of Judge Hatchett ever.

The ball team’s chances depends on the development of players who would stab maturity in the face with a knife if it looked like it might cross the room and tap them on the shoulder. The Blazers somehow managed to dump Damon Stoudamire only to get smaller at the point guard position. Zach Randolph has the quick feet of someone who can dance between cars in a late-night parking lot to get in a kick or two on someone already being punched down to wheel-level. Worst of all, their center is named “Joel.”

Predicted Record: 32-52

* * *

Utah Jazz

The Utah Jazz were my dark horse pick for the Western Conference Finals last year. I based that selection on

1) a few snippets of Nostradamus’ prose concerning a “Mehmut D’Okur” and “the third Napoleon between two rivers.”

2) wishing beyond measure for that moment when Karl Malone would want to come back to Utah and be turned down

3) they were really good in 2003-2004 and added a bunch of better players.

Boy was I stupid.

Despite my confidence in them, the 2004-2005 Jazz won about three games and one-time favorite player to watch Andrei Kirilenko, a combination of Dolph Lundgren’s Rocky IV haircut and a shoddy 1960 giveaway toy with a wire infrastructure, became a skinny Larry Krystowiak.

I think what happened to the Jazz is what happened to the Indiana Hoosiers college basketball team in the late 1990s — coach Jerry Sloan became just old enough that he could no longer kick everyone’s ass, but not quite old enough to leave most of the coaching to his assistants while he made commercials that only showed on local cable.

Predicted Record: -12-94