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99 8 Luftballoons

Just when I thought birthday week was over, they pull me back in. Seriously, it was great standing in line to buy a hotdog with a bustle of balloons strapped to my wrist, as my former boss, The Judge walks past and says hi. Very professional.

You who are responsible know who you are, and revenge will be mine. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but oh yes, it will be mine.

Twenty-Ten

The rumors are true, I am no longer as young as I used to be...

And as a birthday present, I've been slammed at work all week. The civil attorneys out there, groan along with me when I say "deadline for discovery response."

Hopefully, by tommorow, I'll even have time to take requests and preview the Final Four.

Rezzies (Quasi-Belated '07)

I didn't quite meet my, in retrospect, insanely aggressive New Years Resolution '06. (At least not without resorting to Enron style accounting.) It was still worth it, and will be revised for this year, though reduced by 50% to account for my increased work hours. So, 2.5 books a month = 30 books in '07. I already have 3 down, so I'm ahead of the curve. But, been there done that, so I need a new one.

Obviously, passing the AK bar is a priority as well, but that's for, like, work, so it doesn't count either. Plus, I've done it once, what could possibly go wrong?

Which brings me to the actual resolution. With due respect to Lauren's concern (hey, I've been a gym regular since August, so I don't count as one of those pikers. I note that the herd is thinning already,) being careful to avoid tragic mistakes and being cognizant of the generally pernicious effect of using weight as a proxy for health, I still have a resolution regarding weight loss.

Thankfully, it's both modest, and, I think, obtainable. I'm down to about 215 now (from a very mirthful* 230 or so, circa the wedding) I'd like to be under 200 by MARS, and down to around my 'playing weight' (was about 180 in college, but would be more like 190 now given that my upper legs and hips were skinny and not at all powerful back then) by the end of the year.



* Cherubic, some might even say.

Tuesday Thoughts on Tribe, Tony Campbell and My Fuddiness

1. Driving the 20 or so miles to and from my Monday night rec league basketball game allowed me time to conclusively answer Joey's quandry: Low End Theory is superior to Midnight Marauders as an album. I hadn't listened to either in a while, but damn, they are both good (contra Spackerman. But he's too angry to get Tribe to begin with, true, true). As to why LET is better, watch as I take some one else's intelligent words and pass them off as my own:

   The beat in Check the Rhime, and the way they dance around it (and each other) is pure magic. And since the other half of my library is jazz, I love what they do in Excursions and We've got the Jazz. Scenario is just explosive and powerful. Nobody fucking rapped like that in 1991, and here's a 19 year old who's about to blow up.
   
   Don't get me wrong, comparing these two albums is like comparing winning a million dollars vs. winning a million and ten dollars. But there's no question in my mind that the nostalgic and technical and creative impact of LET was superior.

   Indeed.


2. Speaking of my Monday hoops league, I think I'm empirical proof of the Tony Campbell theorem: Given a sufficiently offensively untalented surrounding case, anyone can get 20 per game. (Fun note: TC's point guard? Pooh Richardson!.)
   
   
   
   (pictured: Not this Pooh)



3. Speaking of music, I think I've officially reached the sad day when I can no longer even hope to keep up. I don't think I've bought an album in almost 4 months (The Raconteurs, if you must know). I'm not sure how I feel about this. Surely there has to be some non-suck music coming out these days, right? Who is the "Clipse" I keep hearing so much about? Is there anything of note in the White Stripish Blues-Rockish area? Help a Pooh out here, will ya...
   

Called It

Congrats Chicago Bears. I guess. The Extreme Large Fruit Vessel XLI will be much less interesting with them instead of the Saints, both in terms of the actual game, and the stories leading up to it. I admit to a certain degree of fatigue about hearing about the wonderfulness of the Saints' players and how they Rebuilt that City on Rock and Roll (note that Joe Buck gave Reggie Bush a completely free pass on his outrageous taunt-front flip-and-dance routine on his TD. I have no problem with any of that, but imagine Buck's reaction if it had been, say, The Randy Moss doing those things...), but the Saints are also a more interesting Football qua Football team, I think.

In any event, all that is merely a long-winded windup (like I do), for me noting that Sean Payton made a huge tactical error that likely cost them the game, and I called it at the time. Consider, Uncle Mo has been standing on the Saints sideline since before half-time, Rex Grossman was making Eli Manning look composed, and the field conditions were miserable. Why the hell would you kick a 48 yard FG? Just pin them inside the 20, stop them again, and so on. As it was, Figgie predicitably missed (is it ever a good sign when your kickoff guy comes on to try a long FG instead of the regular kicker. Does this ever work out well?) Saints get the ball inside the 5. They panic, take a safety, and the only time the Bears look in trouble from then on was when Rex almost got picked by Uncle Mo switching sidelines in the middle of the next drive.

And all of this was so obvious at the time, I was expecting Simba's assistant coach for common sense to stop the madness, but it never happened.

Go Pats...

I Swear...

I have interesting stuff to say. No really. Why don't we all assume I've been exceptionally witty for the past few weeks, that way I have some momentum going for when I actually start posting with regularity again.

As an aside, and a recommendation I feel needs to be passed along, see The Prestige if you get the chance. It is all kinds of awesome.

Today's Truths

• Shoals at FreeDarko has an almost indescribably fantastic post about, more or less, basketball as a metaphor for finding meaning in an essentially anonymity inducing consumer culture. Relatedly, I mourn for Francisco Liriano by demonstrating that (shameless) imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
  

• Barack Obama... I mean this is 6 kinds of awesome, and really, for me, this is about 150 kinds of kick-ass. But since we here at WAP are all about substance over style (except when we aren't) how much of this is playing the Saxophone on Arsenio? I just don't know enough to get excited about him for any reasons aside from A) he ain't Hillary, and relatedly B) he might win, even against John (St.) McCain. Now, talk to me about Gore-Obama '08, and I'm ready with the bumper space.
  

• KFMonkey drops the hammer on the third season of Lost _boom. I don't really have anything to add other than to call bullshit on the show's creators any and every time they claim to "know where they are going" with the whole story of the island. If they're just making stuff up at this point, I'll start a fund so that we can get better, uhm, stuff to the writers' room, and we can go full-on David Lynch on this piece.
  

• I am boring (ht: Lance:

How evil are you?

• A tailer-made description of why I keep saying (in comments) that basketball is not-especially amenable to SABR-geekdom from today's Daily Dime:

  
  

  You may never see a highlight of this play, as it did not result in a bucket or dunk, but follow this to get a glimpse of the kinds of things that happen in an NBA game on a nightly basis:

  Deron Williams beats a show by Dirk Nowitzki on a ball screen, drives middle and makes a sweet no-look pass to Carlos Boozer. Boozer, challenged by a good shot-blocker in DeSagana Diop, loses the ball on his way up, sending the ball high into the air. Williams, on the baseline following his pass, jumps high to keep the ball away from Anthony Johnson, who otherwise would have an easy recovery, and bats the ball toward the free-throw line.

  Boozer, Diop, and Devean George all make an effort to get a hand on the ball, but it ultimately goes to Andrei Kirilenko. AK-47 takes an immediate dribble toward the rim and Diop, who gets back into defensive position. Andrei bends his long 6-9 frame down to almost half his size and throws a perfect bounce pass, thru Diop's legs, to a waiting Jarron Collins under the basket.

  As Collins goes up for the layup, Diop reacts quickly and blocks Collins point blank at the rim.

  The entire play takes nine seconds and produces two missed shots, a good hustle play by four players, two terrific passes, and a blocked shot. And no points. Oh, and three verbalized "wow" calls by me as it happened. Highlights alone do not tell the NBA story.

  Nor do the stats as we collect them.

That's all for now. Theo, get it done, or JoBu is coming to get you:

Difficulties

I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I probably won't reach the 50 in 52 mark...unless, I account creatively. Hey, Ezra says it's ok:

I find actually listing the books I read throughout a year a troublesome enterprise. So many of them end up half-finished, somewhat-skimmed, or otherwise partially absorbed that I'm generally left with a fairly small number of books read, and a somewhat overwhelming mass of books somewhat read.

Indeed. I mean if I add together fractional books read, I think I'm probably over the hump. As it is, should I force myself to finish a book that kinda and/or totally sucks just to meet some arbitrary goal?

In my defense I had just finished reading this which I enjoyed immensely, and thought to myself "if I like a 'rivalry' book so much when the author hates my squad, it would be even better to read one where I'm with the Good Guys." Except that Blythe's book is well-written and original, whereas the Sox-Yankees book is reheated, rehashed and probably a staple on many remainder racks at this point.

So I may not reach 50 individual books completed, but will have read the equivalent of 50 full books by the end of the year. This strikes me as a plausible interpretation* of my resolution.

P.S. If you are a hoops guy, I thoroughly recommend "To Hate Like This..." One of my top five or so for the year, and certainly in the top two for sports (along with "Fantasyland" which I still hope to blog about at TWT prior to the New Year")


* It's true, The Law has destroyed what little shred of soul which may have survived the first 29+ years o'life. I'm legalistic parsing my own new year's resolution. This does not end well...

Another Slice of Pooh

My favorite libertarian recently posted an article on FoxNews (how do they still let him post there? He's clearly an apostate. But I digress...) about the sillyness, both substantive and political of the GOP's decision to ban online gambling (read: poker):

The people who are going to be affected by the ban are the millions of Americans who play online poker recreationally — and responsibly. But that $12 billion per year is going to simply dry up. Problem gamblers and minors will still be able to find places online to make wagers.

Any attempt to prohibit consensual activity is going to create black and gray markets. The legitimate, law-abiding gaming sites may now be out of reach for Americans, but that'll create a niche for truly unregulated sites. These sites will be far more prone to fraud, won't much care about the age of their customers, and customers who are defrauded will have no recourse.

There's also no telling who's behind them. But it's probably a safe bet (pardon the pun) to say that the people operating black market, blatantly illegal gambling sites will include a significant criminal element.

This being a topic on which I have some interest (former lives and all that...), I fired off an email, which he was good enough to publish:

Good article. I have two points to make in response - the first is that this is incredibly tin eared on the part of the GOP. My guess would be that poker professionals *should* be solidly in the GOP base - there is no more naked a form of capitalism then the ruthless meritocracy of poker. Yet, as you suggest, in a single move, the GOP has decided to jettison this group (a group with both visibility and money to spare to contribute to candidates who won't try and kill their livelihood.)

My second point relates to the notion that this is simply leaving tax revenues on the table. Yes, the operators of poker rooms won't pay taxes, but neither will the professional players. I subsidized grad school with online poker, and I always paid taxes on my winnings. Now? No way would I expose myself to criminal sanction by declaring "Other Gambling Winnings." And I don't think I'm the only one. Given the size of the market, that's significant tax revenue simply being left on the table so that state lotteries (or, as most poker players refer to them "taxes on stupid people")
and Indian casinos can maintaint their monopolies and we can "save the children."

Missed...

Amidst the hullaballoo of, well, nothing, there was no hullaballoo, I missed the One year anniversary of this here blog (it was roughhly Tuesday). Happy belated B-day, WAP...

Day 3: Arrived

2 independant and perhaps inconsistent thoughts today.

1. I still feel an awful lot like I'm playing dress-up, or going to a halloween party as a Real Lawyer.

2. I'm looking out my window(!) to see the maintenance folks putting up the sign on my reserved parking space(!!). I'm easily purchased, I fear.

Are You Ready For Some (Fantasy) Football?!?

Yes Hank, yes I am. (And so is Lauren)

My draft was last Friday and here's how I did (14 team league so the pickens got, er, Slim down near the end...)

QB Hasselbeck - Sea
QB Johnson - MIN
RB Portis - WAS
RB T. Jones - CHI
RB D. Rhodes - IND
RB T.J. Duckett - WAS
RB M. Jones-Drew - Jax
RB N. Davenport - GB
WR Owens - DAL
WR Horn - NO
WR K. Curtis StL
WR R. Curry OAK
TE B. Watson NE
K Vinatieri IND
D ATL

Little thin at WR, but I think I did ok.

An Announcement

In order to thread the needle of saying what I want to say while not pissing off those of you I consider blog-friends, with...differing viewpoints, I'm going to start posting most of my 'political' content at the new place. So if you just come here for witicisms, musings on sports, and badly-written reviews of worse books, you can take or leave my moonbattery at your leisure.

That is all, carry on.

An Experiment

As some might know, a few months ago I was invited to hang with a group of somewhat similarly minded Balloon Juice commenters (read: dirty hippies) to have a little fun. This good clean fun manifested itself in a parody blog, which though fun while it lasted didn't seem to satisfy any of us.

So in the course of discussions, we decided to start a group blog. And what do we call ourselves? The Kakistocrats!

What, you may ask, is a Kakistocrat? Well, it comes from a combination of the marvelous film The Aristocrats and Mr. Furious's nomination for 2006 word of the year: Kakistocracy:

kakistocracy (kak·is·toc·ra·cy) n.
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

Obviously, this is going to be a left-leaning site, but given the private emails within the group, we are hardly homogenous in terms of viewpoints, experiences or opinions. I think the topics will be all over the map - I certainly don't plan to change my oevre (I love that word...) and other members have interests which range from computer programming to local politics (a subject I hope to tackle more in about two weeks - pesky 'ethics rules'...) There's even at least one Canadian! Who let the Commie in?

Cross-posted at Kakistocracy. All my posts over there can be found here

Vidiocy

Calimachus, on getting sucked into computer RPG's by his son:

As I was racing off to save the world, other characters kept coming up to me to engage me in side quests, whose purpose I now see, but I kept blowing them off, thinking, "No time for that, I gotta go find that prince and stop those demons"

Hi. My name is Pooh, and I'm a vidiot.

I have a confession to make - I was in Best Buy last weekend to buy blank tapes for my "own the World Cup" project (will take approximately 24 tapes to capture the whole shebang - if you miss a game, you know where to find me)...and I almost impulse purchased an XBox360 just to get the new FIFA World Cup '06 video game - the graphics look better than do the games on TV in HD, and the announcers are real life (pre-recorded) Brits, damnit. No Marcello Balboan meally-mouthed idiocy (any announcer who talks about 'good fouls' in soccer is off the island). No Tommy Smythian barmy blarny. Luckily for me, though they had the console in stock, they were fresh out of the game itself (apparently I'm not the only one.)

In any event, I have long been a confirmed vidiot, though my tastes differ from Cal's son in that I prefer the grand scale of Civilization or Transport Tycoon (vastly underrated model train-set type game) to RPG's and sports games to 'shooters' (though Halo and Goldeneye and Doom will always have special places in my heart...) My vidiocy has had two main consequences.

First, despite what people tell you about rotting the minds of our young, I fully believe that video gaming has done as much as anything to develop my problem solving and spatial reasoning skills. Or, more specifically, given the design of the LSAT, Super Mario Bros. got me into law school.

Second, despite the obvious fiction of the game-world it's never been difficult for me to find 'meaning' among the pixels and sprites, whether building empires or seeing how many consecutive years I can win the World Series with the Red Sox (helps when you engineer a massive trade for Ichiro, who's not quite video-Bo, but in the right hands (and with Papi and Manny and...whomever else I trade for hitting behind him) is good for 300+ runs per season.)

So here's to both vidiocy, and Best Buy saving my credit card balance by not having the game in stock...

A Closeted Conservative?

So, after all my huzzaing of RIA's Return (yes 'pick, both of them) (bastard) let's talk about me. One of the things I think is odd about about myself (hey, if I'm going to be narcicistic, I'm going whole hog) is the dichotomy between my 'personal life' and my 'politics'. In terms of what I do, I'm pretty 'conservative' (with the noted exception of religion). I'm not and have never been a club-kid, I dress 'traditionally' (if sloppily, at times), I tend to not like especially 'experimental' movies and music, etc. I'm for capitalism and football (though I like soccer also) and cheeseburgers and beer.

In comparison my politics are demonstrably leftish, though I'd prefer to describe myself as some combination of "Independant" and/or "Centrist", though certainly not "Moderate." (See here for definitional help) Though, my driving ideology is that while I have what I think are the answers for me who am I to tell you what you can do. Of course, I'll tell you what I think you should but that's A) just me being an ass; and B) an opinion, which you can take or leave. Once you start turning "opinions" into laws, backed by men with guns, I start to get the willies. (Across the range of social 'vices' I'm about as permissive as they come, though I participate in very few of them myself. Of course, I don't consider gambling a vice, but that's because I am/was good at it. But I digress.)

Anyway, all this rambling brings me to a study from neuropolitics.org (via the Battlepanda) I ran across a few weeks ago about the differences between liberals and conservatives. Understanding that "anectdote" is not the singular of "data", I thought I'd take a look at some of the findings and see how well I fit the stereotype.

• Liberals are more inclined to believe that the rich and powerful have a negative social value.

Nope. I would posit that a goodly percentage of 'rich people' got that way on some form of personal merit. Bill Gates earned every penny. As did Warren Buffet. Athletes are exceedingly good in a discipline that is well compensated because of popular interest. So, no, I don't think rich people are bad. I think they are self-interested, which is fine, but due to their wealth, they may have dispraportionate influence. Social justice, veil of ignorance, blah blah, you've heard it all before...

• Among men, conservatives are more active in high school sports.

Well I've coached both college and elementary school sports, so I think that's close enough.

• Extroverts have a better sense of smell than introverts.

I have no basis for comparison. Though I am quite good at smelling a rat. (Not literally of course)

• Extroverts tend to be more conservative and more religious.

I'm not sure where I fit in with the whole introverted-extroverted thing. But 'religious' is not me to be sure.

• Conservatives like the colors red and dark blue. Liberal men like dark green; liberal women like light blue.

I wear mostly, wait for it, dark blues, greys and occasionally red. Not so much with the green.

• Conservatives tend to be morning people.

Well, if anything marks me as Looney Left Liberal, this is it.

• Among women, conservatives are more likely to be sex-obsessed than liberals.

I'm clearly in the wrong party then. The 'Ladies Night' theory of political affiliation?

• Liberals curse more than conservatives.

Bullshit. I give you Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Toni Scalia...

• Conservatives like beef more than liberals.

MMMMM. Steak. Tofu sucks. Lots.

• Liberals are more depressed than conservatives.

Correlation/Causation problem here, methinks.

A Pronouncement

According to Icepick, I am allowed to do this. So, I hereby declare the period from March 26, 2006 to March 26, 2007 the Year of Pooh.

Encouragement, insults, witticisms and random randomness welcome in the comments.

362 and Counting (Final B-Day Update) (We Hope)

To whomever,

How did you know?

On March 26 from 2pm (EST) till 3pm [Nena's 99 Red Balloons was] all that played on [VH1,] the American specialty music channel, over and over (and over) again.

The Nena marathon was for the final hour of the station’s “Pay to Play for Hurricane Katrina Relief” fundraiser. According to the Associated Press, “Viewers could request one video to be played on VH1 Classic for every $25 donation. For a $35 000 donation, they could select an hour’s worth of music from the 1960’s through the early 1990’s”.

One viewer apparently decided that the channel just couldn’t have enough of the 1984 protest song that so they requested to have it played continuously for an entire hour.

I have a fever, and the only cure is more red balloons. Sad to say I missed it though. Thanks for the effort.

(And thanks to Fletch for the catch)

363 and Counting (B-Day Update)

In case you were dying to know what was the #1 song in America on this birthday o' mine (since I painstakingly researched the previous 28 years here), Billboard rides to the rescue...(drumroll)


Temperature by Sean Paul. I have to admit that Sean Paul is just the kind of crap I find diverting while driving, so good on him. The #1 status will probably soften the sting of being eliminated in the Sweet 16.