cheese it, the cops!

this week for splicetoday: is it okay to watch football?

who we are

by athletes, presidents, sports anchors and so on, ali is being presented as a hero and an example for us all, specifically in virtue of his resistance to the draft. he changed us, showed us what we could be, etc. but let me ask you this: how many americans, in any walk of life, have followed that example, or are capable of following that example, or have tried, or would not capitulate under far less trying circumstances or at far less cost or with far less incentive? if we are not capable - and i would say that barack obama among many others is not - then i think we should shut up about that part, or simply say that in our actual lives he is an example of what not to do, or what we would advise people such as our children not to do. i think we should feel attacked by that example, upbraided, shamed. that he is a hero shows that we are cowards. he may be an example to someone somewhere, but he is not our example. 

let me ask you even this: for what principle, or for what people, would you risk your health insurance? reflect and answer that to yourself as frankly as you can. alright then, who are your actual heroes? i fear that, on reflection, it will be clear that your actual heroes are successful bureaucrats. we are pretending to live with commitments and to admire courage, but these are fictions.

a proud accession

ladies and gentlemen: marques haynes and the fabulous magicians!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the nut graph:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i looove your hair. it's so damn curly!

 

 

magic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

here's a non-technical, non-epistemology, non-physics entry. i frigging love john wall.

 

inappropriation

somehow the united states went from 'congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press' to “There are a lot of names and descriptions that were used over time that are inappropriate today,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said. “And I think the name this is attributed to the Washington football club is one of those.” in other words, we used to value a bold brawling discourse; now our speech is run by little schoolmarms: 'inappropriate!' honestly, that something is inappropriate, other things being equal, recommends it. i suppose 'appropriateness' is the constitutional standard on prior censorship of expression in our jurisprudence?

outrage

sports commentators often get into outrage wars. they're in one now over ray rice, and if you watch pti or around the horn etc, they compete to recommend ever-harsher penalties, call for everybody's resignations, and so on. one frequent function of public outrage, i believe, is to insulate the person talking form the imputation that he might do something like that. surely no one expressing that degree of outrage could also be an abuser, um. whether one ever has committed acts of abuse or not, what one is really saying is: i would never do that. it's a disavowal, perhaps particularly relevant for the jocks, because people are associating their culture with abuse.

racialism never goes out of style

the little league world series makes it clear that the united states and indeed the world is still pretty racially organized. it was an all-black team from chicago against an all-white team from nevada for the us championship; japan v south korea for the international. now they're playing black against asian for all the marbles. i say whoever wins gets to be master-race until next year.

shirts and skins

wait, you can't trademark slurs? oh man i need to re-think my business plan.

welcome to rednexico, usa

i live in york springs, pa, known locally as 'little mexico' i go with 'mini-mexico', 'micro-mexico', 'pocket mexico', 'nano-mexico', 'rednexico', or 'mexico in an andrew wyeth' depending on my mood. so i've decided i'm rooting for mexico in the world cup. (also, perhaps due to the fact that it is ruled by authoritarian dolts [harvard jd's], i'm not feeling all that patriotic about the usa; mexico is better-governed.) viva el tri!

 

go, johnny, go

true i am enjoying johnny weir as a skating commentator, and it's cool that that fabulous of a queen can be on tv all day. however, i have one reservation: he very much preaches the gospel of "if you believe in yourself, you can do anything." honestly i don't know how that idea ever occurred to anyone, much less became a cliche we teach to our children, etc. it attributes actual omnipotence to any given high school schlumph. or it really creates for each of us a special religion of our self. i used to believe in god, or like, trying to do right or whatever, now i believe in myself. hence i can do anything. look, if there is anything i know by foundational, incorrigible, privileged-access introspection it is this: i am an extremely implausible candidate for godhead. if you don't know that about yourself, you are dangerously demented.

this morning johnny was saying that the skater on the ice had told him how much she had learned to believe in herself and that she could do anything. he said that just as she was going into the triple loop or whatever on which she wiped out. dude, whatever! believe insofar as possible all that is and only what is true - or at least try not to say with the utmost simulated commitment anything that you yourself know to be false and insane - and get to work!

but how about this from just now: "i love the beginning of this long program; she's just letting us all know she owns us". or he had a pretty hilarious rap on the limitations on sexual expression in a brother-sister pair, etc. he's very sexy and fun. 

a rod indeed

it is indeed bizarre that the insanely disgusting alex rodriguez is playing professional baseball. i would like to point out that no one is forcing joe girardi & co to put him in the lineup, and that it is really wrong for him to be on the field, or really anywhere here in the human world. at this point i'd be scanning the stands and, in particular, the dugouts, for snipers. when he goes to take a leak and shoot up he might just get jumped and rodneykinged by his own teammates; you might want to keep him in hiding for his own protection. at least we wouldn't have to watch that fuckhead play. 

big girl

i know you've been waiting for me to declare my position on this. no, brittney griner will never play in the nba, though she's the most dominant player in the history of women's college basketball. she's a skinny 6'8" center, and slow to boot relative to the nba. the best bet to try this, again (a few have tried before) is someone who can play point guard, like maybe  the cal player layshia clarendon. meanwhile that shoni schimmel, whose louisville team just beat clarendon's, is an amazing athlete.

that's the greatest play i've ever seen in women's b-ball, which i do watch.

against beyonce

beyonce's halftime show has been garnering universal ecstasy, or literal idolatry. i have to say i hate framing musical performances in these insane-scale spectacles, which beyonce's show is, even not at the super bowl. but it just invites the response that the hugeness is inversely proportional to the truth at the heart. anyone that intent on distracting attention from her music probably has very good reasons to do so. anyway, i'm just gonna stare at something like that and go: wow that cost millions. what bullshit. i don't think even the sheer spectacle had any real visual unity or a great deal of panache or anything; it was just supposed to bludgeon you into obedience.

ok beyonce can dance, but the style is still paula abdul and the laker girls with a little more stripper. the whole performance worked best as softcore porn or like one of those victoria's secret shows. i'm supposing that beyonce can sing, though i'm not as clear as everyone seems to be that she actually was. but even her voice was buried in audio sludge, and that's pretty true on the records too. i don't think the music means anything. seriously. the best riff by far was that horn thing on 'crazy in love,' which is a sample (of course there were models sort of pretending to be a horn section behind her). now i have less than no problem with sampling as a compositional and production technique; still there were no comparable musical accomplishments in her set.

the lyrics are just today's empty pop things, with the occasional pause for the 'believe in yourself' power ballad where one pretends to emote with unparalleled intensity. she does that no better than miley cyrus, and if you think that people can perform songs like that sincerely, you're not understanding that they don't engage or reflect any particular experience: they're like the self-esteem posters at the middle school. they might be aimed at your demographic, but not at you; in a way there's nothing it could mean for something like that to be sincere or even insincere. the pepsi jingle has more content, and really it might have some connection with what's inside you, or will be if you pop the top and tip it over into your mouth.

in short, that's just the kind of show caligula would have ordered up if he'd had the technology.

were i booking next year's super bowl halftime show for a useful contrast, here'd be my first brainstorm: what if we could get a reunion of the fugees instead of destiny's child? how would lauryn hill frame her voice and material? well, it would be personal. it would have dignity - she would have dignity - and believe it or not i think that is sexier. let wyclef do 'stayin alive.' wait, that's nas! maybe lauryn isn't as good a singer as beyonce (i'm not sure because no one knows what beyonce really sounds like singing in the shower or whatever). but that doesn't matter. lauryn sings great and she wants you to know what she's singing and she has a real connection to it. she might, even in this bloated context, move you, and not just her moneymaker. 

i've been on this various times before, as in this, which ran in the latimes.

'more conscious of the way we raise our daughters.'

the nola fatses

i'm not feeling pelicans for the nola basketball team. don't know how they couldn't get 'jazz' back (not that jazz didn't come from salt lake city). how about the satchmos? ok maybe not. yo here it is: the dominoes, after fats (fats domino was great and took a whole style of nola music to the world). scads of cool domino-themed merchandise beckon. too late to win the contest, though. it has that little flavor of vice that says 'new orleans' while still being also a kids' game. also of course fats is a katrina survivor, bringing it all together.

te'o and media

i can be pretty hard on reporters who get stories wrong. like i was ragging on all the misinformation they were purveying on newtown. but i'm going to forgive them on the te'o story. it's just not the sort of thing you'd think someone would make up. it spoke well for us that we wouldn't require verification on something like that, just believe the raw emotion he was...expressing. well, i suppose even things like that have to dissolve in our current context, including social media. but that's sad, see? do i resent the fact that i was laboring under a misapprehension? well yeah a bit. how much of a burden was it to continue to labor under that misapprehension for a few extra weeks? indetectible in the face of the actual burdens that confront me on any given day. this crap ain't exactly watergate. believing a college kid about his tragedy is not like believing what some politician or military spokesman or corporate flak is saying, which are real and constant problems in american journalism. so i just don't feel that there is a big media problem here, except maybe that te'o was tailoring the story to fit into espn's formulae. the formulae should be reflected on not least because the narrative forms they deploy are getting awfully old, and have the sort of falsifying imperatives that alway arise when you try to read actual life as though it were a novel.

or: how could notre dame not release this information as soon as they had it? well, this is the kind of story that there just is no urgency in reporting to anyone. now, maybe it's disturbing that they waited til after the championship game, but really we don't know how the deliberation went at all. it's sad, stupid, and fucked up no matter how it happened, but nothing turns on getting it out immediately at all: it has no, like, policy implications. no one has to make up their mind about anything on its basis, at least until the draft. 

linebackers and negative existentials

sometimes real life tumbles into the rathole of philosophy. this sentence has been produced by all media: manti te'o's dead girlfriend never existed. maybe my ex-wife never existed too! that would piss her off though. yo the present king of france is bald, bitch: check the online pics. but i sympathize with te'o. it's hard to lose somebody you love so much to leukemia, even sadder to lose someone you love so much to the sheer implacable fact that she never existed at all: the loss is retroactive and total. indeed, it would be hard to die of leukemia; but it would very, very difficult never to have existed. it makes death look like a picnic. worst of all would be never to have existed at all and to die anyway. that surely is the worst of all impossible worlds, and it is being reported as a fact this morning on cnn. anyway, please give me a russellian analysis of these propositions?

livewrong

a few lance armstrong observations: possibly testicular cancer is a side effect of steroid abuse. and now i guess he's reached the stage of redemptive snitching. i'm not sure there's ultimately any treatment for the tendency of people to try to find one of their number to elevate into a little god, or the disease of hero-worship, but certainly no number of empirical refutations appears adequate.

Acknowledging his doping past has cleared the way for Armstrong to take the next step in trying to mitigate his lifetime ban from Olympic sports. He is planning to testify against several powerful people in the sport of cycling who knew about his doping and possibly facilitated it, said several people with knowledge of the situation.

african queen

i have to say that the olympics track and field competition is, among other things, an amazing celebration of black womanhood. lord that field for the 100 metres: what a magnificent group of african warrior princesses, with incredible fire in the eyes (as well as unbelievable acceleration, of course). also i'll pay tribute to the rather shocking virginity of 29-year-old lolo jones. let's just say that she's running against the tendency of the culture. that is sexy.

 

allyson felix:

 

tianna madison:

 

 

shelly-ann fraser-pryce (the world's fastest woman):

 

carmelita jeter:

 

murielle ahoure:

 

 

cack blunts

In his verdict, Riddle said there was "no doubt" that Terry had uttered the words "fucking black cunt" during the final stages of the match at Loftus Road last autumn. He had done so in anger, he said.

But it was "impossible to be sure" both of what Terry said and what Ferdinand had said to him.

Riddle concluded: "It is therefore possible that what he [Terry] said was not intended as an insult, but rather as a challenge to what he believed had been said to him. In those circumstances, there being a doubt, the only verdict the court can record is one of not guilty."

the idea that insults are crimes is insulting, hence criminal. and the idea that an insult directed at one grown man by another is a crime shows that, while we are not all 'fucking black cunts,' we are certainly a beautiful rainbow of little fucking pussies. you actually have a judge trying to lip-read videos and crap. (as well as concluding with magnificent stupidity both that there is no doubt that terry said it and that it's not certain that he did, and that 'fbc,' offered in response to an insult, is not itself an insult; these are the thoughts of a man wondering what the hell he is doing with a case like that in his courtroom.) maybe having said it 'in anger' is an element of the crime? surely terry meant 'fucking black cunt' affectionately. plus maybe he didn't start it! where's the assistant principal when you need him? by what means the government convinces itself that such things are crimes or that it is their legitimate function to intervene, it is impossible to say.

dang

i was wrong about joe paterno.

jack white's riff

sitting at home with a stomach bug watching the euro football tournament. ukrainian fans, russian fans, danish, german, spanish: they sing the riff from "seven-nation army": tens of thousands in unison. well, it's a great riff. for that matter, american college basketball crowds do the same; perhaps we'll hear those seven notes at the nba finals tonight. i wonder what it would be like to have written something like that. it's like you produced a little poem that became a world-wide universal cliche, a phrase-fad. the closest analogue i can think of is "we will rock you." now certainly you would regard it with a certain pride, but it might also be a sort of burden; nothing else you ever do will have such an effect, and now it is you: no escape or revision or re-interpretation is possible, really.

fidelity

everyone seems to be calling for the head of marlins manager ozzie guillen, who expressed admiration for fidel castro. this is just ridiculous. am i called upon to agree with the politics of of the coaches of the sports teams i root for? or they with mine? i realize this is a sensitive subject in miami, but the man's opinions are irrelevant to anything and everything, including the conduct of his team and anybody's dealings with cuba. on pardon the interruption last night, the usually delightful kornheiser and wilbon were asking how people would respond if guillen praised hitler or bin laden. now, i am very not a fan of totalitarian marxists, i.e. marxists. but those comparisons are silly.

ethnic pussies

here's a relatively typical case in which the exquisitely delicate ethnic sensitivities of the press preclude them from actually reporting the story: espn fired a staffer for an 'offensive' headline: we report the story at length, but can't actually say what the headline said. that's frigging ridiculous. we'd do our basic jobs, only we're pussies. the headline itself was only up for a half hour, and for example reading this account would make it impossible to reach an informed opinion on whether the firing was reasonable. you don't want to offend your readers, who are not at all offended for example when you report the actual facts of a murder in excruciating detail. well, lord knows this - whatever it was - was worse than murder.

sophocles in happy valley

you often hear the term 'tragedy' used to mean almost any bad thing. but aristotle could have used joepa rather than oedipus as his model.

the art of sucking

what i like about this is not that it skewers tebow, who has after all been sent to save a wretch like me. what i like is what it shows about david bowie. fallon's singing is overwrought yet flimsy.the outfit is ridiculous. however, the lyrics are much better than bowie's (admittedly that would be hard to avoid), the singing no worse, the fashion sense less palpably pointless. of course bowie and tebowie more or less share the same 'melody.' it's as though bowie built a magnificent palace of suck in which every single detail sucks royally, but in which the whole sucks exponentially more than any of the constituent parts.

eat me, nfl

that the nfl limits more or less everybody to a single game in the 4pm time slot is ridiculous. (right now we're all stuck watching the packers blow out the raiders, while close games are happening elsewhere.) maybe somehow they want to funnel everyone into the same advertisements at the same time. or maybe they have a deal with directv, which is the only provider that will even sell you all nfl games. but really it cannot make business sense. surely you want to maximize your total audience, so given that you've got a broadcast crew at every game, you should make them all available, even on the web. otherwise i'll be watching tennessee-martin at bethune-cookman in field hockey in a minute here. of course, many people are not in the markets of the team they root for, so while they always do broadcast the in-market team, a lot of us miss most of our games. i listen to the redskins on internet radio.

what actual businesses of now have found out is that it doesn't pay to constantly irritate and alienate your customers. you want them to have an easy and good experience every time. you want to give them what they want, a decent actual lesson of capitalism. it's like when, in the late 80s/early 90s, consultants designed stores that would funnel you down the far-right aisle to the back wall if you entered the store at all: they literally forced you to walk down a long aisle of sale items, then all the way back to the front to get anything. they might even have sold slightly more stuff per customer. but the stores were always empty because you immediately realized it was going to take you twice as long to find and pay for anything than across the street. and you immediately understood that you were being manipulated in a hideous psychological experiment, with you cast as the rodent, rather than being served. floor plans have been opening up ever since.