Feb 2K6

Another Basketball Jones Satiated

Saw the Pistons triumph over an angry yet ultimately ineffectual gaggle of Cleveland ballers last night. LadyK scored great seats near the floor and mentioned that her birthday is but a couple months away and what, by the way, would I produce? Pressure is more than gas...seriously. Something about watching a ballgame in enemy territory is gratifying, especially when the right team wins, but I don't want to overstate it. Cleveland fans are pretty cool, a different species than Raider fans-- who could scarcely pass for human unless they were standing amongst a lineup of Judge Judy outcasts.

I wish that team officials and arena officals and dumbass pr officals created a basketball atmosphere instead of a circus atmosphere. I go sporting events to watch athletic competition, not watch some moron in a furry suit bang incessantly on a mini-snare. Moondog somethingorother, the Cleveland Cavalier mascot, is annoying to the point of being detestable. He runs around the ballcourt perimeter extolling the faithful to make more noise, as if that'll inspire the Cavaliers to play decent defense. Worse, at regular intervals, Moondog parked himself no more than 20 feet in front of me and my seatmates and beat the mortal shit out of this little snare drum which produced a sound not unlike someone unleashing birdshot upon a new set of rims, or a tired set of rims. You get the point.

After every timeout and especially during halftime, club officals felt it nessesary to trot out some variant of a third-rate urban sideshow.

And now, straight from the poles of Scores, your Cleveland Cavalier girls.

Watching pro cheerleaders do their thing up close is scary and a little sad. There is an ambient 'we don't give a shit about sports, but it's either this or interspecies porn' vibe. Sure, most men, and sporting events market to men above all else, don't care if the female talent enjoys the work or not. If they did, strip clubs wouldn't do so well.

The game itself was tight up to the final few minutes, and that's when it seemed that the Cavaliers lost their will. . Part of that was due to Detroit's suffocating defense. The thing some folks don't realize about the Pistons is that they are supremely athletic, even amongst the larger NBA brood. They can out-run, out-jump, out-hustle, and outlast the opposition in almost every situation. When crunch time came, Cleveland had nothing left. Rip Hamilton made three clutch 15 footers in a row, and told Moondog dipshit to stick his bongo up his bum.

Neither team shot well, yet until late in the 2nd half, players refrained from driving to the rim. I know it's gotta be tough to do something where you're ensured some physical punishment, but jacking up one air ball three after another gets old. I excuse 'Sheed from his three ball fetish because he never takes a play off on D. Not only is he aware of his man, but if the play shifts somewhere else, Wallace is great at help defense. Unlike, say....

If you care, look at the photo and see why LeBron's Cavs will again struggle to make the playoffs, current standings be damned. At home, in front of a rabid crowd, Lebron stood around on D far too many times when he should have been either helping a teammate or going for a loose ball. He played good last night but not great. OF course he's only 21, and I suspect he'll man up and learn to play at top intensity every night...somewhere else.

Meanwhile, Detroit has played 4 games along the past 5 days, and won all of them, supremely hard in the NBA, where the physical rigors of ball are not far from what skill players endure in the NFL. At any rate, there's something about screaming 'DEE-TROIT BASKETBALL' into the face of an annoying mascot and surrounding hostiles that's supremely satisfying.

- k

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The Evolving Power of One

Currently listening to Quicksilver from Art Blakey's stupendous A Night At Birdland. Recorded live in 1954, Blakey's quintet blew the doors off the joint that night. Five musicians and a soundman created then one of the five or so great jazz recordings of all time, and like much of the best jazz, it was done live, in one session...on the fly. Although all components fit perfectly, especially on the Quicksilver piece, Lou Donaldson's alto almost defies words. It's an explosion of music, so pretty, chaotic, and passionate that I sometime's forget it's Blakey's band, and believe me, Blakey's drumming is not timid. Technology being what it was, the best musical recordings we have from the 50s are in the jazz realm. The jazz greats, whether they were billed as solo artists or part of an ensemble, almost always relied on the group. In the 50s you couldn't create a good record on your own.

Some 25 years ago, Prince turned heads when he refused to sign a major record deal unless he could write, produce, and play everything himself. I know this because at the time I was riding with Moms in her '75 Mustang while Casey Kasem bleated out the Prince particulars before playing I Wanna Be Your Lover. Good song, I thought, might work well on the roller disco circuit. Casey talked about Prince at some length, and my 12-year-old brain couldn't process the fuss until Casey said:

And then one summer he decided to learn the guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, and horns.

One summer, eh? Pretty talented fellow.

My imprecise research indicates that Stevie Wonder was the first major artist to control every facet of his musical creation, but Prince expanded the template. Listen to the scope, not to mention the funk, of 1999. That's a lot to come from one mind. Solo artists always worked with session musicians, unless they were folkies. The solo artist either sang, sang with guitar in hand, or sang from a piano bench, and 99% of the time the solo artist was backed by a coked-out gaggle of session hacks who all looked like Captain Stubing's bastard children. Toto were session musicians...and I still know the lyrics to Rosanna. Anyway.

Fast-forward to now and funny how something as cold-sounding as a digital processor has opened up so many possibilities. Solo musicians can create and mix any sound they wish from the comfort of their laptop, in fact there's a (sometimes derided) term for this kind of music, but it misses the point. Dis IDM or laptop rock to your peril, because we're way past the point where an artist can make an electronic record, if he's talented enough, sound every bit as organic and impassioned as Blakey's Birdland set.

A couple years ago, back in Cali, I got into a friendly argument with a co-worker about the plusses and minuses of electronic music. Craig, being uncomfortable with both numbers and computers, saw electronic or computer generated music as blips and dots, interesting maybe in small doses, but nothing compared to his beloved prog-rock titans of the 70s. I tried explaining to Craig that digital representations of sound are every bit as valid as analog, and to me maybe more so because the sound author has more control over and how the sound recipient(s) absorbs the content. Sound is vibration, everything else is means.

From the mid 90s on, folks like Richard James and Scott Herren, among many others, have quickly put forth a musical cannon that defies labels. Using found sounds, samples, and programming, the listener can't be sure how what he or she is hearing came from. That's how the creators want it. Now days collectives and proper instrumentalists like Devendra Banhart and Deerhoof pay tribute to electronic music, especially the glitchier tangents, and the power of individual creation by playing music that is clipped and often unorganic sounding, yet pleasing. All a way, I think, to further posit a popular notion that one needs to judge the music on the sound, not where the sound came from.

Visual entertainment is following audio. I can, if I had the time and the talent, make a compelling 3D animated flick from my computer with a lush soundtrack and visuals that look straight from Pixar. Sure, it would take 5-7 years to assemble, but that is changing too. Visual content software is ridiculous already and evolving by the day, and we're still in the silent film era of computer generated entertainment. It's rather awesome if you think about it, and there is nothing cold or impersonal about it. The cool thing, and something that speaks well about humans, is that after we've reached a point where software and virtual reality removes the need for collaboration in composing, performing, and with regards to the audience, absorbing, entertainment, we'll still go to great lengths to do just that, to engage in these mediums as communities. We have to, that's a vital part of who we are.

As for the results?

- k

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Scumdogs of the Plain

During a brief political discussion about the decline of American unionized labor a few days back, some dinner guests asked why I didn't just come out and declare myself a conservative republican. After all, I believe in individuality, liberty before equality, and a diffuse government (equal power distributed to the federal, state, and local levels). Yet I'm also ecoGreen (don't get me started on our Dept. Interior and Agriculture issues), and a staunch believer that government must insure equality of opportunity, which is way different than supporting equality regardless of talent or character. If you're motivated to do well in life, the fact that you grew up in the projects shouldn't screw you for life. Many true conservatives think that we should go ahead and bomb the projects into soil-meal and gentrify it all into golf courses or prisons.

Liberals have, over the last half-dozen years, rarely failed to disappoint me. Once upon a time I had hoped that responsible left-leaning thought would prevail, and Bill Clinton's political philosophy exemplified that. Clinton's platform, sans the baggage of the person, should have had the Democratic Party on hitch for a generation, much as Reagan's ascent did for the Republicans a generation earlier. However, Americans have hangups about other people's baggage, since among other things, it allows us all to divert attention away from our own baggage...kinda like keeping up with the joneses, but different. Still.

The Michael Moore / Cindy Sheehan wing of the Democratic party represents between 15 and 25 percent of all Dems and potential Dems at any given time, yet it's these wingnuts who get an outsized portion of press coverage, scaring moderates to the point of keeping tottering incompetents like Dubbya and his misfiring cronies in office. During his first campaign for President, Bill Clinton distanced himself from such looney cats by dissing Sister Souljah and other far-left freaknicks, keeping evangelical minorities and blue collar crowd in the donkey's camp. Al Gore and John Kerry followed that up by trying to play the common-man populist, which is a bit like expecting Fred Durst to croon Carmen pitch perfect. They dumped Bill Clinton's successful political platform simply because the man behind the platform liked to bang chunky interns. A smart fella needs to know how to seperate wheat from chaff.

Then the Democrats put John Dean in the DNC chair and now expect, what exactly, to vanish like the Whigs? Makes me wonder. Aside from his stance on the death penalty, Bill Clinton was a socially liberal free trader. He was also fiscally responsible. Bush is neither, but he knows how to protect Americans. He keeps telling us so, and Katrina didn't count since them was mainly poor black folk who lost homes and lives and what exactly do they contribute to RNC coffers anyway? Word.

No one is going to get everything right. But when we make mistakes, we should try to correct and better ourselves. The Bush administration does not care for that. They used to chide Democrats for being too beholden to the polls, which is rank hypocrisy. Karl Rove carries a formula in his head, and what that formula produces, essentially, is what the administration can get away with without alienating too many evangelicals or too many small-government conservatives. The formula works. Instead of 'Turdblossom' Rove's nickname ought to be '51%'.

Basically I told our dinner guests that I seek only honest and effective government, answerable to an informed public. I don't want or need religion in my government, nor do I want partisan agendas. Rush Limbaugh is more odious to me than Michael Moore, mainly because Limbaugh's dim brain is too weak to understand that in America, opportunity comes mostly to the white and to the connected. Conversely, Michael Moore thinks that a roomful of evil rich w.a.s.p.s control the nation and the world. As if. I would pay serious money to see Moore and Limbaugh square off in the UFC Octagon. Visualize that for a few moments...the spandex, throwing bolos like excited sissies. I think Mike Moore would scratch the bejesus out of Rush, unless el Rushbo was hopped up on some hgh-opiate mix.

This is what I want to see emerge in these desperate times: Bill Clinton without the baggage. Does such a person exist? If so, would he or she like to endure the shitstorm of being in American politics? I've never doubted for a second that there are scads of talented folks who think the right way about the important issues, but most of them won't come close to politics because the risk-reward thing is so off-kilter. That said, if we're going to have one deeply flawed dipshit after another in the White House, best then to make sure that the White House doesn't have too much power.

Wonder how we're doing on that?

- k

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13feb06

War and Pesto

"War, children, it's just a shot away."

That's not me blindly snaking a Rolling Stone cliche so much as it was the first thing I heard out my stereo once I'd powered everything up this morning. Those very words. My iTunes shuffle mode is always on. Any given morning it's just as likely that I'll be greeted by Wagner as I'll be by Slayer. Today it was the Stones. I pictured our Veep singing that tune as he spanked his buddy with some birdshot. Nice thing, imagination, since there's no way in hell that Dick Cheney listens to the Stones now or back when his boss was doing bumps in the country-club bathroom.

I think and read about war more now than I used to, and I've always thought about it, but not to the exclusion of much else. I still spend more time thinking about cartoons, sex, food, and how in the hell our condo association can send us a bill every month and not ever remove snow or ice from our driveway and walking path. I'm not living in Gaza, I expect good services for my cashish. LadyK is threatening an armed insurrection against the Condo Association. Half of these things are run by the mob, so I'm trying to talk her out of it. You never wanna start something you can't finish. A good rule for home improvement and armed conflict.

Just finished a ham and pesto half-sandwich while plotting the location of my future herb garden. The ham came from an overpriced supermarket, but I made the pesto myself since the overpriced supermarket, and other nearby overpriced supermarkets, carried pesto at $5 per 8oz, with ingredient labels that start off with either sunflower oil or cottonseed oil. Sunflower oil has no taste or discernable health benefits to speak of, and cottonseed oil is laced with more toxic chemicals than the soles of a bummie's sneakers. Cottonseed oil comes from cotton, a non-food crop. Non-food crops can be sprayed with stronger and more exotic pesticides and herbicides than the crops we typically eat.

The nerve. A person or company who makes pesto with any oil besides extra virgin olive should be barred from producing or handling food. It's just not right, on so many levels. We're already settling for too much awful food. Typical store-bought tomatoes feel and taste like candlewax. Monster strawberries from California's San Joaquin Valley flood supermarkets at $4 bucks a pound. They taste bland, just like mainstream Yankee culture...bland. Industrial farming companies breed their plants to stay firm and fresh though the processing and shipping process at the expense of taste. I'm not sure why you need to trade the taste for long-term freshness, but I'm not a plant geneticist.

Most green veggies still taste pretty good, in part, because they are often grown locally, in greenhouses. No long shipping times, more on demand growing from region to region. This is especially true for money-makers like basil and asparagus. I know this because I buy basil all the time. When whipped up a batch of pesto yesterday I bought 3 ounces of it, at $2 an ounce. Maybe I'm sensitive, but that seems a little high. I spend $10 to $15 a month on freaking basil. Throw in regular cilantro and other herbal purchases and suddenly I'm measuring out a space in the backyard to put in an herb garden once the soil thaws...after I put up a fence, of course. Were I to see the neighbor's pooch pissing on my greens, well, it wouldn't play well, and I'd be back to dealing with the Condo Association.

Mr. K's perfect pesto:

30 raw almonds
1/2 tsp coarse salt
4 to 6 black peppercorns
1/4 tsp hot red pepper
2 cloves garlic
2 cups basil
5oz Asiago cheese
5oz Romano cheese
1 1/2 cups extra virgin olive oil

Place everything BUT the olive oil into a food processor and chop it, then blend it. Add olive oil, blend more. Chill.

Finally, a word or six for now about the cartoon jihad. As my friend Nate and the Economist both insist, it's a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech means that you must learn to live with being offended, period. This is normally where I go into a 1,000 word diatribe about fragile Islamic sensibilities and the blowback from colonialism we're all facing, and hell I might even be tempted to toss in a Rodney King quote or something, but really, why bother. This cartoon dustup is but one more straw atop a camel long ago smothered under the weight of old bales real and imagined. When Bernard Lewis wrote about the upcoming clash of civilizations in the early 90s, I thought it was nothing but histrionics. I was wrong.

The only way to put the showdown off is to appease the extremists, and we know that appeasing extremists eventually takes us from bad situations to extremely bad situations. I still hope against hope that a viable democracy will emerge in Iraq, along with some stability and security in general, causing revolution to sweep Syria and Iran before Israel decides to start bombing Iranian nuke sites. But with so many forces in the Middle East now gearing for a showdown, it all seems moot. Too many people wanna fight, and the cartoon mess is just another way to let us know. We're dealing with an adversary that hates the Enlightenment, hates us, and wishes us destroyed. You can't negotiate past that.

September 11th was the opening salvo in what will prove to be a very very long conflict, immense in scope and tragedy. Never sell a fanatic short. They may be crazy, but they have a plan, and lots of nervous energy.

- k

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7feb06

New Genie Same Bottle

When Hamas swooped into office a couple weeks back, a few things crossed my mind: Fatah, which should mean 'Arafat's gangsters' in Arabic, must be the worst governing mafia this side of Damascus to lose power to Islamist extremists. Then I remember that Palestinians have been on the wrong side of history so many times during the last 40 years that maybe it's a point of pride among the electorate to pull shit like this.

That's hyperbole for you. Hamas, the streamliners of suicide bombing techniques, are also pretty deft with the charity organizations. They are known, in Gaza especially, as school-builders and educators (a good deal of Hamas' chieftains are engineers or doctors), void of corruption, caring folk...men of God (obviously), and all-around good chaps. Safe to say that no one in the Palestinian territories will sketch out Mohammed drawings with a nuclear turban or blood dripping from pointed fangs. Israel now has a vehicle to implement the rest of their unilateral disengagement plan, and woe betide any Arab farmer, clan, or nation who lobs a rocket or six over the wall....

Hamas now has to govern, and I expect in the short term they will do surprisingly well. Though the U.S. and Europe won't give another penny to the Palestinian territories, Iran most definitely will. Hamas will build more schools, cut down on corruption and slowly but surely implement their vison, and in a way become the western frontier for a new Islamic Caliphate. Saudi and Egyptian figureheads will shake in their pointed boots.

Radical political Islam has more faces than just that of Al Queda, something that most of the world has been slow to grasp. In a region with outrageous unemployment, inadequate education, run by brutal AND inefficient governments, and thus short of material hope, purifying strains of governance will come to the fore, given the chance.

Think about what really drives the Arab masses crazy: unelected and corrupt governments, supported by the United States, leaving most Arabs powerless while most of the larger world surges ahead. If democracy comes, the choices will be limited to the status quo or Islamists, since the only things not totally repressed during the age of Mubarak, Saddam, Assad, Al Saud, et al., were the Mosques. If there was an Arab Thomas Jefferson along the past 40 years, chances are that he was eventually casterated and fed his nutsack in Abu Garib or like hellhole in Egypt or elsewhere in the region. It's really that simple.

The Hamas / Iranian model of political Islam is going to gain a lot of traction across the Middle East over the next 10 years....and while the political wings do their thing, you can bet your datebread that the military wing will continue to do it's thing.

Which reminds me:

Yemeni Prison Break-- No, not a Greenwich Village emo-punk outfit, but the result of some undoubtedly interesting collaboration between Yemeni officials and the formerly imprisoned mastermind of the USS Cole bombing.

The convicts escaped via a 140-yard-long tunnel "dug by the prisoners and coconspirators outside," Interpol said. The Yemeni official said the prison was at the central headquarters of the country's military intelligence services in a building in the center of the capital.

That kind of escape doesn't happen without help from the outside. Al Queda, Hamas (and the larger Muslim Brotherhood), and Hezbollah, are all quite different regarding means, most notably Al Queda doesn't even belive in elections, wheras Hamas and Hezbollah see elections as a tool to bring them closer to their goal, but they all strive towards the same end. We read about bickering among the factions, but I doubt that'll inhibit tactical cooperation. All parties want an Islamic Caliphate from Cairo to Islamabad, and all factions want Israel destroyed.

Osama's dream is coming to pass, in a way. Iran's clerics have consolidated their power while Hamas takes over the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah ascends in Lebanon. Iran, though a driving force in all this, is untouchable because a) they may already have nukes, and b) even if they don't have nukes yet, the United States does not have the manpower to sack the Iranian regime without bringing back the draft, and NO ONE has the political balls for that.

Many if not most Arabs will choose an efficient though puritanical Islamic fascism over thuggish Fatah-like mafia bullshit if given a choice between the two. Sadly, they don't have a third option. Pity for them, and eventually, after Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Iraq, follows suit, pity for us too.

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Super Feh

Super Bowl XL was the one of the most poorly played championship games in recent memory...unless my memory is totally stewed, and that is a possibility. Had the commercials or the halftime show carried some value then maybe the generally poor play on the field would have meant less.

Two things outside the mediocre gameplay stood out for me. The GoDaddy.com commercials were just unbelievably bad on just about every level. First, the viewer has no idea whatsoever what these people are selling (web domain registration), and secondly, are you going to tell me that a rich old man is going to need the oxygen mask after seeing a pair of stripper titties? Really? Please, that's what rich old men do, prima facie. If that commercial had a ring of truth to it, the old guy would have popped three Cialis and donned the leather vest the instant the first areola came into view.

Who's idea was it to wheel the Rolling Stones onto the halftime stage, in Detroit, home of Motown? Seriously, the paper trail has to lead somewhere. I felt not a little cheated as I watched the Stones play through their most vanilla hits while LadyK occasionally interjected-- "Wow, Mick Jagger really moves around good for his age."

At any rate, the difference in the game was that Pittsburgh was able to unleash three spectacular plays from the mire of jittery execution and the Seahawks were not. The team I was rooting for won, and that's good enough for me.

My friend Dan, a lifelong Steelers fan, had the quotables which sum up my feelings as well:

It wasn't pretty, but they got the job done, and that's all that matters.

I'm really happy for Cowher more than anyone else. a class act for a long time and saddled with the reputation of not being able to win the Big One (as if anyone could with Kordell Stewart or Mark Malone or Neil O'Donnell at the helm). Well, that monkey is off his back, thankfully. And what a nice way for the Bus to end his career.

Props to Hines Ward for making 2 huge catches, and basically keeping Pitt's head in the game. Props to Big Ben. Yes, his stats were dreary, BUT: he threw a clutch 3-28 pass after somehow keeping the presence of mind not to cross the line of scrimmage, he did get that ball to break the plane of the endzone, despite what many sportswriters have been spewing today, and he did make the key block that let Randel-El make the perfect TD pass to Hines, and he did run for a couple of key first downs when it was 3rd down. So, he might be bumming a bit today in that he wasn't a star like Favre, Brady or Elway, but he got the job done.

And please, enough with "the refs gave Pitt the win." Sorry, the refs didn't miss 2 field goals. The refs did not blow the coverage and allow the longest run in SB history, the refs did not continuously kick the ball out of the end zone, the refs did not drop 3 passes (2 of which were over 20 yards), the refs did not throw a horrible INT when the game was on the line. The Hawks did all of those things all by themselves. and while I'm ranting, enough with the "the NFL gave Pitt a home SB game." Sorry, douches, the SB was planned to be in Detroit long before anyone knew that Pitt would be in it.

Amen brother.

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23jan06

Big Ben Lets Broncos Know What Time It Is

My Detroit Lions played terrible football during my childhood, much like they play terrible football now. Me and my elementary schoolmates were thus divided into Steelers and Cowboys fans. I was a Steelers fan. I grew up on Bradshaw, Swan, Stallworth, Harris, The Steel Curtain, Lambert, and the rest. I hated everyone on Dallas, and everyone in Dallas. Sure, my friends and I said we'd root for the Lions over anyone in the playoffs, but that was like saying I'd root for my Dad in the ring against Ali. Reality and fantasy. As kids in Flint, we knew to keep them separate.

The coolest subplot along the Pittsburgh Steelers' amazing 2k6 playoff run has been the ascension of Ben Roethlisberger into the top echelon of NFL quarterbacks. He was money against the Broncos, cutting up their defense with precision darts that looked weird coming from such a big and goofy-looking quarterback. As everyone is saying these days, Roethlisberger has outplayed Phillip Rivers and Eli Manning, the first two quarterbacks taken in the 2k4 draft. Looks like Steelers coach Bill Cowher finally has the conduit for his long-suppressed creative streak. My only Super Bowl prediction is that the Pittsburgh Steelers will put on an offensive display that'll shut up the Cowher-bashers once and for all.

Cowher has been constantly knocked for being too conservative, but I understood where all that came from. It was never about philosophy as much as it was about talent. Try coaching Kordell Stewart for a half-dozen years and see what THAT does for your nerves. Cowher has been the Steelers head coach for 14 years and in that time has been blessed with QB standouts like Neil O'Donnel, Stewart, Tommy Maddox, and other implosion artists...a veritable talent pothole. Stewart, the prototype of a skilled headcase, had the habit of throwing a crippling interception at the exact moment the Steelers could least afford it. Cowher no doubt remembers a playoff game against the Broncos in '98 when Kordell kneecapped his team twice, with Denver on the ropes no less, by twice tossing wild balls into the end zone to Bronco defenders. That kind of stuff can put a coach onto regimen of prozac, or Wild Turkey.

No matter, now, Pittsburgh finally has their QB, their bookend to Terry Bradshaw. Only great quarterbacking can march a team through the playoffs, one road game at a time, against the 3 top seeded teams (Cincinnati, Indy, and Denver). Maybe Big Ben will pull a Kordell in Detroit, but it would shock me. Coming through in three consecutive pressure-cooker games betrays a tack towards greatness. These next 10 years or so will feature some excellent duels between Roethlisburger and Tom Brady, ala Bradshaw and Stabler from back in the day. Payton Manning will get to watch the excitement from the comforts of his living room after his annual 1st-round exit from the playoffs. Bully for him.

After the Steelers punched their ticket to Detroit, I fired up the NBA League Pass and watched the Pistons squeak by a very determined Houston Rockets squad. Tracy McGrady, his gimp back, and his shorthanded crew, all played their asses off. Even though the final score was 99-97 Pistons, I never really thought the outcome was in doubt. Detroit is like that. To quote Chauncey Billups:

I like games like that much better than like the games when we win by 10, 15 or 20 points. I don't like playing games like that.

The Pistons are 33 and 5, a gawdy record in any professional team sport. Pistons players themselves couldn't care less one way or another. They just want to play ball better, more precise, and demoralize their foes. That's the sign of great team, well, that and an immense level of talent spread evenly across the best starting five in my living memory--yeah Celtic fans, I'm looking at you. Dennis Johnson wasn't as good as Rip or Chauncey, and I'd put our front court out there against Bird, McHale, and Parrish in 1986 and be comfortable with my chances.

At the level Detroit is playing right now, they are with the '86 Celtics and a hair below the '96 Bulls.

Hitherto a few weeks ago, Detroit's only weakness appeared when their starting five went collectively cold with their shooting hands. With Flip Saunder's new flowing offense complimenting Detroit's traditional stout defense, cold streaks and lapses in general have been rare this season. During a debacle loss in Cleveland last month, Detroit's starters all shot the ball like they were wearing boxing gloves, yet played tight defense to keep the game close. However, the cold shooting stayed with the starting five, and with no offensive support from the bench, frustration set in a bit. Rasheed and Tayshaun in particular made some defensive mistakes, undoubtedly because they were thinking about their wayward shooting, and these lapses turned a tight game into a near-blowout. It only happens when all the starters are cold and they bench doesn't step up. It's happened thus far 4 times out of 38 games (against Dallas, Cleveland, and Utah twice), all loses.

Funny thing is happening though, an insurance policy is emerging to hedge against cold shooting by the starters: Carlos Delfino.

Larry Brown thought Delfino was a bit of a slacker and a whiner, and left him off last summer's playoff roster in favor of Darko, mighty Darvn Ham, and Ronald Dupree. Back then it kinda made sense. Delfino was still mending a surgically repaired knee and played with hesitation on the court. He moved his feet like he was dragging cement blocks, drawing too many fouls for too little production, offensive and defensive. Fast forward to now and I think if Flip Saunders leaves Defino off the playoff roster this spring, someone will need to install hidden cameras in his office to make sure Flip's not smoking crack. The change in Defino's game has been huge.

Instead playing shy, Delfino now shoots without hesitation, and can drive by just about every swingman who tries to guard him. Better still, he has ramped up his defense. I'm not sure if Ben Wallace is tutoring Defino or what, but he gets better at moving and setting his feet to cut off driving lanes with every game. He's also improved his help defense, knowing when he needs to switch assignments as the play develops. A large part of this is happening because Delfino trusts his knees again and thus is willing to be aggressive in all phases of the game. However, a larger part of it is that Delfino has bought into the Pistons toughguy mentality, something you're seeing more of from foriegn players....Delfino and Manu Ginobli are light years from Tony Kukoc. I'm still coming to grips with the nice suprise that Defino is, which makes the Darko fiasco easier to laugh at...we don't need no stinkin' legit no.2 draft pick, we're the Deeeetroit Pistons. I imagine a future where Carlos Delfino plays ball like a bigger stronger version of Ginobli.

I know, I know, maybe I'm jumping the gun. Maybe Delfino is a decent player going through a hot streak, but still, when I see a 23-year-old pro player abuse the competition, as Delfino has on many times over the past few weeks, then like with the emerging young quarterback I was writing about 30-something lines ago, we have something to watch. The NBA playoffs need to happen to determine what exactly Delfino, and the Pistons in general, can do, but I have a good idea how it's going to play out.

- k

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18jan06

Iran's leadership loves attention

Immediately following 9/11, I figured that the last gasps of Iran's hard-line factions, especially the ruling and unelected Revolutionary Guard, were upon us. Fifty percent of Iranians are under 25. Most like the West and our ideals, if not our practices, and are increasingly well-educated in western thought. They, the majority of Iranians, are tired of the isolation and privations their theocracy provides. Fifty-plus years after the CIA engineered a coup that tossed aside a democratically elected government and inserted the Shah and his secret police, yet another revolution, this time of the Georgian or Ukrainian shade, would come to pass. I was sure of it.

Then the Iraq war happened. Our three years in Iraq has shown Iran's theocratic leadership that the United States can be tied down militarily, even though the U.S. military is tied down on Iran's doorstep. Iran's leadership calculated that they had a few more years to talk smack and develop nuclear weapons. Manpower-wise, the only way we can take over Iran while Iraq is in the balance is to bring back the draft. You never know.

Then this certified loon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was brought to power under the pretense of fair elections. Ahmadinejad, a civil engineer by trade (like Osama), and radical enough to be a desert Wahhabist if not for his Shia kink of his Islamic faith, apparently wishes to hasten the apocalypse. The Iranian president is backed by the ruling clerics and he advocates that Israel should be 'wiped off the map.' Look, I understand that some of these cats are edgy because their neighbors have been sacked by U.S. forces, and, come to think of it, that's just the kind of thing that can make a madman go completely around the bend.

Because young and educated Iranians wish to be more western, and because Iran is currently surrounded by the most highly trained and deadly, and overstretched, military on the planet, Iran's ruling clerical claque sees no way out but a showdown, either with us, Israel, or its own people. They know that time is not on their side, that they must have a deterrent against invasion to match their terror deterrents against revolution. Nukes are a good deterrent against invasion.

Here's how it's going to be:

Either Iran's freedom-seeking majority rise together and sack their radical theocracy, or we will go to war with Iran. Israel has already stated that they absolutely will not allow Iran to develop nukes, since doing so would allow an existential threat to flourish. Remember, the President of Iran has already advocated the elimination of Israel. The United States, especially with President Bush at the helm, will not make Israel do all the dirty work herself, ergo, we will do the dirty work. Make no mistake, it will be a nightmare.

I hate thinking about that. No justice no peace.

- k

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Know What You're Knocking For

"I'll chop ya up and stick you in the mattress like drug money."

Jay-Z was an excellent MC. Reasonable Doubt and The Black Album are aging well.

I was screwing together some code yesterday, listening to Richard D. James's Come To Daddy -- the title track like 1988 Ministry and Motorhead together on angel dust and transmitting from within an active blender. Intelligent Dance Music? Shit, that's old-time industrial metal, man.

Tapping away on the keyboard, screaming out 'Eye willllll eat your soul' (my new neighbors are prolly on to me by now) and compiling a little animated diddy that will prove interesting even if it ends up useless, Come To Daddy ends and the opening chords of It Never Seems To Rain In California pours a gallon of honey and cheese-whiz onto the blackened mood ring. iTunes shuffle feature strikes again. It's like some artificial intelligence or something. I could never hear a transition like that on the radio, not even satellite. Drill-n-bass aficionados rarely mix with the 70s easy listening crowd, save for maybe at the Power Exchange.

You can set the level of randomness in the i-Tunes shuffle. You can also create specialized playlists and sort them by artist, genre, release date, or contributions to teenage suicides. No matter how I shuffle the music, patterns emerge within a few songs. Satellite. radio stations will jump on this some day. Stick a thousand albums worth of music onto a hard drive, hook it up to iTunes or WinAmp hit the shuffle button and go outside and let the groupies smoke you out next to the dumpsters, you know, the one your station shares with the Rally's next door.

But then again I'm human, most of the time, and we humans are wired and keyed to pick patterns out of anything and everything. Ask Oliver Stone or your friendly neighborhood NYT columnist...the first rule of random is that there is no random.

Then I hear the opening bassline of Under Pressure and think 'damn that Vanilla Ice' and then realize for the 1,000th time that it's still one of the 20 or so greatest songs of the past 50 years, exposure be damned. Freddy Mercury's voice was a force of nature, the best pipes in the rock kingdom by a mile, then and still. Having Bowie as a sidekick merely added ballast to the bombast.

It's about at this point, into the first chorus of Under Pressure, 2 in the afternoon, deadline on my toes and gaining weight by the second, that someone rings the doorbell downstairs. I think nothing of it and keep working, mindful of my own shoddy personal appearance, and dark mood, after spending all my time since 6am staring into...this...goddamned...screen..<*yank* *crash*>.

One thing about working from a home office is that I am less presentable than my counterpart inside a cube. Unless I have outside appointments, I'm rocking the sweat pants and slippers...looking like a slimmer but no less disturbing version of Aqua Teen's Carl. A few moments later, another ring, followed by a flurry of frenzied knocking. 'Something bad has happened in the village,' I think, getting up and jogging down the stairs to see what emergency has crossed our bucolic exurban paradise.

Like any front door worth it's salt, ours has 2 locks, one inside the doorknob, and a bolt lock about two feet up from the doorknob. LadyK locks the bolt, I rarely do. If marauding teenage gangbangers are going to sweep through our little cul-de sac and take everything not bling nor nailed down, then I'm going to need a stronger deterrent than locks. Nothing says 'get off my property' like the chambering of a shotgun shell.

Whoever's waiting for me on the other side of the door hears me unlock the doorknob and jiggle the door vigorously as I understand, dimly at first, then keenly, that the bolt was locked, and that I would need to find it's key, which I had, to that point, never bothered slipping onto my keychain. I grab a set of keys hanging from a hook in the mud room and amble back to the front door and try everything on the ring...no go.

Now on the verge of launching into a spasm of frustrated violence against all objects within grasp, I run back upstairs and start digging across desktops and recently populated drawers until I come across the key I need. I slip it onto my keychain, make a mental note about the procrastination and unlock the front door. It's a hair past two in the afternoon, and here's what the knocker's see:

I am wearing a green flannel shirt I bought at Britches Great Outdoors in DC between 10 and 12 years ago, and no undershirt. My slippers are new, but my green sweats have a hole in the knee and some thining elsewhere. I'm wearing a ballcap, and since LadyK was curious to see me with facial hair, no razor had touched me in 10 days, so I looked stricken with the mange. I am working on three hours of sleep because sometimes when I juggle projects I leave things hanging until the last moment. I WILL eat your soul if you didn't have a damn good reason for beating down my front door.

There are two well-dressed ladies in the doorway, and I about to ask who died or what was violated, when the lady nearest the door-- mousy long hair, ~40, and a gleam in the eyes I know well, reaches into her large purse and pulls out a bible the size of a bathroom scale.

"We wanted to speak to you about--"

"No. <*slam*>"

I have nothing against Christianity, or Christians, or Hindi, Pegans, Moonies, or whatever. People gotta find their way in this crazy world and if that means you must find mystic attribution for all life's quirks and sheer random happenings, that's cool. But don't beat down my door to push your issues on me...unless we're close (family and/or friend). Even then I'm going to question why you think a certain way. No malice, just looking for cause. The holy rollers at my front door did this thing as a service to their church and religion, and of course they do it during the daytime, in nice residential neighborhoods, because that's where you find the black sheep both lost and well-heeled. The new evangelicals aren't spending much time in the projects...does nothing for the tip jar.

Next time I'll just chamber a shotgun shell on the other side of the locked door. Won't have to say a word.

- k

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02jan06

When I was a kid, it was difficult to find good music in Flint. You had either mall stores like Sam Goody and RecordLand, or mom-n-pop places like Jellybeans-- where the stock was always a crap shoot. I couldn't get three feet into RecordLand during the middle 80s without tripping over a stack of REO Speedwagon cassettes and stumbling into a sever-foot cardboard bust of Huey Lewis, and if I wanted a copy of Reign In Blood or No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith I was faced with either driving my 3 tons of '72 Gran Fury to Detroit, or finding the right college radio signal at the right time with my recording devices at the ready. In 2k6, a critical mass of the wired world have said goodbye to all that nonsense.

I either own or have instant access to 99.5% of all sonic content I could ever want. If it's not listed in my own digital library, my RealRhapsody music service has it on demand. If I hear something on Real (and they have a mind-boggling selection-- from Mehldau, Mendelssohn, Meshuggah, and Morrison to Tool, Tom Waits, Traffic, and Tchaikovsky) and I want to buy it, Aquarius, Amazon or the Apple Music Store is but a click away. Choices all up in you.

LadyK, who hitherto couldn't care less about streaming digital entertainment, or technology in general, was nevertheless keen to acquire a Sirius satellite receiver for her vehicle. She is a Howard Stern fan, has been since the late 80s. Without the FCC on his ass all the time Howard is supposed to inaugurate his new broadcasting life on Sirius with a torrent of f-bombs and in-studio granny-porn next Monday morning. I'll be listening. I can't stop watching the wheels of human wreckage turn, neither can you. Howard knows this. Enter coked out porno stars, Jeff the Drunk, Corey Feldman, and heaps of Howard's own smug self-loathing. What a creeper. What a dork. What a genius.

Satellite radio will be bigger than cable because they are a global broadcasting solution, meaning, they can pool niche markets and individual quirks into profitable and sustaining global markets. Combine the 500 to 1,000 Goth true believers in every medium and large town on the planet, you have a collective of like tastes profitable source of revenue for both signal providers and advertisers. Companies like that. One reason cool shit was hard to find in Flint was that the Flint area was basically an AOR, Classic Rock, and Pop R&B sort of space. All the cover bands played Motown and Bob Seger. There were not enough people to create viable niche radio markets. Stinking dinosaurs like ClearChannel and Viacom loved the bland landscape, and now they are chewing extra nitro pills because their days of relevance are gone and their days of existence are numbered. When Sirius or XM sell enough units that they can offer a three kinds of Classical Baroque stations, or a 90s White Backpacker Hip-Hop station, watch for ClearChannel's Chapter 11 announcement.

Mass communication works both ways. Time Warner Cable knows what I watch, when I watch, where I live, and what I do. The information gathering and organizing power between Time AOL and Google (merrily going about the process of buying <ongoing and verifiable> AOL and then <speculation> Time Warner proper) will make the NSA look like a bunch of stick-rubbing mouthbreathers. I wouldn't worry too much about government spying. Despite hype to the contrary, we can still regulate our government at the voting booth. Corporations are a bit different.

If Big Brother, and at this point there are a few of them, wants to watch you, there is nothing you can do. Our society made a choice to push forth advances in choice and convenience without pushing forth smart regulative stipulations. It often comes back to the reaping and sowing thing.

On a more micro level, I don't expect much change outside the white walls of our new condo along the next several months. It is Winter in the Rust Belt, after all, a stasis that life-long Californians cannot comphrehend, and something that transplants are gleeful to be free from. Inside the house, however, things will be humming...and hammering.

This place has nearly 600 square feet of undeveloped space downstairs, in what the county assessor currently refers to as the 'basement.' Because it has both two large windows and a sliding door into our future hot-tub space (the backyard patio), the terrace level of this dwelling is destined for much more than merely basement status. The previous owners tacked drywall along the walls, but not across the ceiling. They also slathered globs of mud across the seams and nail-marks of the drywall. It's a start since hanging drywall is rarely fun and almost always frustrating, given the weight, brittleness, and awkward dimensions of the product you're nailing against the wall.

Smoothing the walls and applying some primer won't be so bad, but the floor and ceiling at this time are concrete and bare rows of two by eights, respectively. Design ideas are bouncing around my head. Originally, I wanted to finish the space in a tribute to Clinton Portis, currently my favorite NFL player, but LadyK shot that idea down and then went to Wal-Mart to buy a snub-nosed .38-- she's not telling me where she stashed it. While I seek to find LadyK's gun and swap the wadcutters for blanks (just in case I find a nice stripper's pole for 12 bucks on eBay and can't help but set it up downstairs...just for decoration, though, that's it and that's all), I'll soon post some photogs of the basement as it is and then regular updates as I get to making it into my dream den. I may even stick a web cam down there. It'll be like a TLC show, but weirder.

Inside Outside. Fire and Ice. Micro Macro. No Justice No Peace. Screws not Nails.

That how we're rolling this year.

- k

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