Matthew Yglesias

There Goes The Neighborhood

Superficially, my neighborhood seems to be gentrifying like gangbusters. In practice, I'd never had any real crime-related problems in almost two years living here until this week. But tonight for the second time in seven days someone has walked right up to my door and tried to get in while I was sitting right there in the living room. It's a kind of freaky experience. It also makes you wonder what they're teaching in burglary school these days. At a minimum, the criminal penalty for robbing a live person inside a house is way higher than that for burglarizing an unoccupied residence. Never commit a violent crime when a property crime would suffice!

Good News For Giant Apes

Via Kerry Howley, the IWF gets really dumb:

It’s Kong, furthermore not the wimpy humans in the movie (epitomized by the fey Adrien Brody playing sensitive-writer Jack Driscoll and supposedly Watts’s love interest), who saves his lady from being eaten by dinosaurs. I loved the scene in which Kong first rips a stegosaurus’s jaw in half with his bare hands, then beats his chest with pride. Brody, as ever in this movie, arrives on the scene too late. No wonder he’s no match for King Kong in Watts’s heart.

So I took away my own message from the movie: Whom would I rather have around when the going got tough: a jaw-jaw chattering class intellectual like Brody or a primitive red-state brute along the lines of King Kong? I think the answer’s pretty clear.

In the real world, I take it that the average woman's odds of needing rescuing from a pack of dinosaurs is rather low and I imagine dating an enormous gorrilla would have some important downsides. Nor does it seem to me that comparing the men of red America to said giant ape is necessarily the most intuitive way to defend the honor of the red zone. I take it that if even the liberal Matt Yglesias had drawn a red state / non-human primate analogy I would be attacked as an elitist.

Youth

We've had a couple of discussions here about how old/young the Pistons are. Mark Cuban's posted some interesting numbers on that subject by taking each time and calculating the weighted average of its age by multiplying player age by the number of minutes the player is actually on the floor. Looked at thusly, Detroit is an old team, with a weighted average age of 28.62 years, sixth-oldest in the league. On the other hand, the Heat and the Spurs -- the two teams with the best chance of stopping them -- are older 29.39 and 30.50 respectively.

Dreyfus

David Gelertner, in the course of being silly about all kinds of other stuff, remarks:

History has (predictably) been much harder hit. In the early 1970s, many good students took a year--long college--level ("Advanced Placement") survey course in modern European history, and another in American history. Since then, modern educational techniques have worked an outright miracle. Today most incoming college students don't seem to know any history at all. (Except what they've learned by themselves, or their parents have taught them.) The high school history textbooks favored by public schools here in southern Connecticut are pathetic. Their left--wing bias is blatant; the authors don't even try to hide it. Maybe they don't even see it. Recently, a graduate student at a major research university told me that she knew doctoral candidates in humanities departments who had never heard of (for example) Devil's Island and the Dreyfus Affair. They will soon be turned loose on the world as aspiring young scholars.

This strikes me as evidence of a serious absence of left-wing bias in our curricula. Or maybe Gelertner thinks Dreyfus was guilty? But seriously, the Dreyfus Affair would fall pretty low on my list of "need to know" historical events. As it happens, my historical learning leans very heavily toward France, Russia, and the 1789-1918 "long nineteenth century" in which context this appears as a fairly significant event. But it makes perfect sense for lots of people's historical knowledge to not be oriented to these things. There's only so much you can expect a given person to be well-informed about and the sort of thing that I (and, apparently, Gelertner) happen to think is interesting isn't obviously the most important part of the human saga.

Blister on the Court

Combining this blog's new topics of music and basketball, let me observe in re: the Nuggets-Sonics team that "Blister in the Sun," while kind of awesome, is not a very good basketball song. By contrast, Amerie's "One Thing" -- the previous tune in the Pepsi Center -- is an excellent choice for these purposes.

Pistons: All That

So I'd developed this notion that the Pistons weren't really all that. I can't even recall what the evidence for that notion was, but I'd been clinging to it. This was probably related to my failure to watch any actual Pistons games except the one where the Wizards beat them. But now I watched the San Antonio game and the Miami game and it's pretty clear that I was, um, wrong about that. I still don't quite understand why they didn't try harder to challenge Wade's defense when he stayed in with five fouls and four minutes to go, but obviously it worked.

No College, No Date

On Catherine's list of kinds of men she wouldn't date:

6. those without a college degree. does this make me evil? i'm not quite sure. anyway i'm sure there are exceptions.

I wonder if a lot of people feel that way. If they do, it's going to create issues, because not that many men go to college:

At colleges across the country, 58 women will enroll as freshmen for every 42 men. And as the class of 2010 proceeds toward graduation, the male numbers will dwindle. Because more men than women drop out, the ratio after four years will be 60--40, according to projections by the Department of Education.

The problem isn't new-women bachelor's degree--earners first outstripped men in 1982. But the gap, which remained modest for some time, is widening. More and more girls are graduating from high school and following through on their college ambitions, while boys are failing to keep pace and, by some measures, losing ground.

Underperformance in education is no longer a problem confined to black males, Hispanic males, or even poor whites. In 2004, the nation's middle--income, white undergraduate population was 57 percent female. Even among white undergraduates with family incomes of $70,000 and higher, the balance tipped in 2000 to 52 percent female. And white boys are the only demographic group whose high school dropout rate has risen since 2000. Maine, a predominantly white state, is at 60--40 in college enrollment and is quickly reaching beyond it. There are now more female master's degree--earners than male, and in 10 years there will be more new female Ph.D.s, according to government projections. American colleges from Brown to Berkeley face a man shortage, and there's no end in sight.

(I should say I don't necessarily endorse what that article says, but the statistics are right). More chicks for me, I suppose, if everyone agrees with Catherine. Meanwhile, Harvard was a serious laggard in the trend toward the feminization of higher education -- the Class of 2008 is the first in history to be mostly women.

King Kong

Jesus Christ that was a long movie. I'd been told it was long -- had heard stuff like "they probably could have edited it down a bit" -- but it was long, long, long. I'm honestly baffled that the studio let them do that. You easily could have lopped an hour or more off the thing. Or padded it out just a tiny bit and split it into two movies. Well made, etc., etc. but I think there's an actual reason movies don't normally get made at that length.

"Did You Go To Dalton?"

I saw D.E.B.S. yesterday afternoon on DVR while I was pretending to be working. The Village Voice's review says:

Angela Robinson's D.E.B.S. aims for a mix of Heathers wit and Batman TV-show camp. Buried in the SAT is a secret personality test measuring aptitude for espionage; top scorers are outfitted with the Uzis and Catholic-schoolgirl uniforms of an elite assassin squad called D.E.B.S. When D.E.B. Amy (Sara Foster) confronts notorious criminal Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster) her triumphant handcuffing morphs into girl-girl crushing. The racy preppy humor starts to pill up quick, but Stillman-starved haute bourgeois will chuckle when Lucy's sidekick (Jimmi Simpson) asks a Pollyanna D.E.B., "Did you go to Dalton?" If you did, and played Buffy beer shots at your safety school, this one's for you. For everybody else, its distributor hopes, there's Miss Congeniality 2.

Since I did, in fact, go to Dalton, I guess I'm not objective, but I thought the movie was at least semi-funny. At any rate, I was interested because that exact same line of dialogue occurs in the movie version of American Psycho:

You look really familiar. Did you go to Dalton ?
I think I met you at Surf Bar, didn't I ? With Spicey ?
Well, maybe not with Spicey, but definitely at SurfBar. You know, SurfBar.
Anyway, Surf Bar sucks now. It's terrible.

That scene occurs in the novel, but Dalton isn't mentioned there; instead it comes up in some other context. As far as I know, it's not a question with any broader cultural resonance and, indeed, I don't think anyone has ever asked me if I went there.

The Long Tail

The Internet -- good for indie record labels. Speaking of which, thanks to Last.FM repeatedly telling me I'd like them, I finally checked out Pretty Girls Make Graves last week. They'd been hovering around my horizon for forever now, but I kept ignoring them. And wrongly so! Great stuff. Bought both albums.

Most Wrongheaded Review

Another installment of unorthodox year-end content -- 2005 most's wrongheaded music review: Splendid pans The Woods.

Butler Watch

Three straight starts, and a third straight win. Chucky Atkins' solid play also makes me wonder if maybe he shouldn't start as well, with Gilbert playing as a two. Then Jared Jeffries (who is, after all, 6'11" and thus not much of a shooting guard) could replace Michael Ruffin, who the Comcast announcers love but is basically no good, in the second unit alongside Hayes, Antonio Daniels, and Etan Thomas.

Harry Potter and the Sloppily-Built Fantasy World

So, one way or another I've recently gotten sucked into the Harry Potter mania and finished off the first three books over the past couple of weeks. They're strangely compelling reading, as advertised. At the same time, I find it hard to notice that they conspicuously lack one of the main attributes of most of the better science fiction and fantasy writing, namely the sense that the author has created a really convincing, well thought-out world. Most notably, there's this whole question of the Muggles. Most of the time, you're supposed to think the existence of wizards is some huge secret in the Muggle world. At the same time, though, it's important to the plot that some wizards come from mixed families and others are "Muggle born." But if wizards are marrying non-wizards and, even more, some non-wizard parents are sending their children to wizard school it doesn't seem that this can be much of a secret. Conversely, all-wizard families like the Weaselys are portrayed as laughably ignorant of the Muggle world. They don't know how the Underground or a telephone work. They don't even know how to pronounce "escalator" or "telephone." But Hogsmead is supposed to be the only all-wizard settlement in Britain, so presumably wizards who don't live there would interact with Muggles a lot.

Now one can dream up ways for all this to make sense, but the point is simply that one doesn't get the sense reading the books that this has all been thought-out very well. That's in stark contrast to The Lord of the Rings and most other classics of the genre where readers have a clear sense that it's all meticulously planned-out.

You see it even in less remote things like the portrayal of Quidditch. Are their junior varsity teams at Hogwarts? It seems that there aren't. But then how do new players get recruited to the house teams. And it also seems that each House team only plays three matches all year, which doesn't really seem plausible. And why is there no inter-school Quidditch play? Etc.

It's not a huge complaint, all things considered, since as I say the books make you want to keep on reading. But this business also renders them sort of unsatisfying, you don't feel like you're really inhabiting an alternate world, it's just a string of yarns.

The Meme of Four

Ezra's tagged me so I'll step up to the plate:

Four jobs you've had in your life: Prospect writer dude, Rolling Stone intern, press aide for Chuck Schumer, summer camp counselor.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Not my four favorite movies, by any means, but ones I've re-viewed many times without them starting to annoy me: 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner.

Four places you've lived: New York City; Cambridge, MA; Washington, DC; Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

Four TV shows you love to watch: The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, Seinfeld.

Four places you've been on vacation: Paris, France; the Outer Banks, North Carolina; Brooklin, Maine; Reykjavik, Iceland.

Four websites you visit daily: Blogs are on RSS! So, WashingtonPost.com, NewYorkTimes.com, ESPN.com, and the stupid Apple Start page.

Four of your favorite foods: Sushi, breakfast tacos, lamb vindaloo, the chicken tenders at the Black Rooster near my office.

Four places you'd rather be: The couch sits me pretty well right now.

Four albums you can't live without: That's a total bullshit question -- obviously everyone could live just fine even without their favorite albums. I mean, what am I supposed to say. It'd suck if there was no The Clash, but I could survive listening to London's Calling or some greatest hits compilation. I guess Surfa Rosa would make a poor substitute for Doolittle and I like Pinkerton a lot less than the Blue Album. Maybe I should say something really weird. I guess I listen to Julie Ruin more than never, and unlike other albums I like, I don't think I'd just wind up hearing it on my friends' stereos. But that's a stupid answer. The Chronic is classic.Frankly, I think this meme kind of sucked, so I won't pass it on.

Top Five Canadian Indie Rock Albums

'Tis the season for top ten lists. But I think year-end top-ten lists are usually dumb. So I'll try to put on some lists on slightly-less-cliché subjects. So forthwith -- my top five Canadian indie rock albums of the year:

• Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary
• Stars, Set Yourself on Fire
• The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema
• Metric, Live It Out
• Broken Social Scene, Broken Social Scene

I sort of want to give Pony Up! credit for being the best new Canadian girl band, but since so many of the above bands use women singers as is that seems pointless so I'll just leave things this way.

Start Caron

26 points, five rebounds, and the Wizards win! I wish Jarvis Hayes a speedy recovery, but there's no need for him to return to the starting lineup. The 'zards still ought to pass to Brendan Haywood more.

The Absent-Minded Blogger

You know how sometimes you get these big work-related mass-emails and ignore them? Well, I do that a lot. The last one I ignored turned out to have been about a change in the holiday schedule telling me not to come in to work today. Probably should have read that one. Empty office is creepy. Guess I'll figure out something else to do....

Should Caron Start?

Amy Sullivan thinks the Wizards need to start Caron Butler. I tend to agree. He's getting a reasonably healthy 28 minutes per game but that's quite a bit less than he's played in the past, and on a per-minute basis he's playing more effectively than last year. Indeed, John Hollinger gives him a very solid 19.64 PER, far and away the best of his career. Meanwhile, all five of the Wizards' most effective five-man lineups include Butler, but he's not in either of their top two most popular lineups. Indeed, their most-used lineup (Arenas-Hayes-Jamison-Jeffries-Haywood) is tied for least-effective. Obviously, none of that's entirely dispositive, but it looks like a pretty solid case to me, especially since the other thing isn't working very well.

Ho, Ho

Now this is a great example of why everyone hates Glenn Reynolds:

HMM: "[T]he UK will start recording the movements of all vehicles on the roads, upgrading the already existing CCTV network so that they can automatically read license plates numbers as they pass by, and keeping that information for two years. And with no FISA court authorization." This gives me an idea: Perhaps Bush should simply say that he's surrendering to critics' demands that we take a "more European" approach to national security.

There are about a whole bunch of very serious issues being dodged here in favor of making some lame-ass joke at the expense of Bush's political detrators and the issues aren't even the same anyone since the British government isn't, you know, breaking the law to do this.

State Quiz

You're New York!
Well after the rest of the world had moved on, you were still obsessively discussing September 11th. Even now, it feels like it's September 12th to you. Though stuck in this traumatic rut, still unable to sleep, you've been able to continue to pursue some primary interests, such as using public transportation, scraping the sky, and trading stocks. When you trade baseball cards, you make sure to swindle everyone around you and pretend that the system is fair. You feel like you know Hillary Clinton, even though she's a complete stranger.
Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

This, of course, is a semi-decent description of New York City, but it hardly works for the vast wilds of upstate. Like many of our fine states in this country, I doubt there's much to be said about NY State in general, there's just a big disjoint between the different regions.

Syriana

This is a bit late, but I think people who found the plot of this movie too confusing must not have been paying attention. It made about as much sense to me as any other thriller. Portraying oil companies as the sole drivers of American mideast policy strikes me as a bit daft. It's hard to look at the Iraq War and not see some genuine ideologues, and some genuinely moronic fuck-ups at work, along with hefty doses of panic, ignorance, and political cowardice. Naturally, oil companies are influential and given some policy initiative will find a way to bend it in a more rather than less profitable direction but the portraying them as the prime actors is pretty anachronistic -- American policy in the 1950s arguable was like that, and consequently things looked pretty different. Not unrelatedly, if you want to be conspiratorial about America and the Arab world in the 21st century, I don't see what business you can have just leaving Israel out of the picture.

Blown Calls

People complain about NBA officiating a lot, but that mostly seems to me to be more about a culture of whining in the league -- generally, the officiating seems fine to me. These final minutes of the Pistons-Blazers game is being called terribly. Errors are going both ways, but mostly benefitting Detroit and being so egregious that even the Detroit-based TV commentators can't defend them. Game's not done yet, but there's a very real chance these blown calls are going to cost Portland an upset.

Polygamy

Stanley Kurtz warns that plural marriage is coming now that we've let gays in on the act. Meanwhile, in Foreign Affairs Robert Sapolsky says people vary:

The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry. And we have fashioned some religions in which violent acts are the entrée to paradise and other religions in which the same acts consign one to hell. Is a world of peacefully coexisting human Forest Troops possible? Anyone who says, "No, it is beyond our nature," knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

That seems slightly disingenuous to me, on the monogamy/polygyny/polyandry score. Formally polygynous societies outnumber formally polyandrous ones pretty massively in human history. That's why polygynous groups will often simply be called "polygamous" without confusion. And formally monogamous societies never fully live up to that ideal, and there's a marked tendency in the direction of informal polygyny as seen in the differential remarriage rates for divorced men and women (what you tend to see under legal regimes of easy divorce) or the tendency to punish women's infidelity much more harshly than men's (more pronounced in legal regimes where divorce is difficult). Not coincidentally, people have a moderate degree of sexual dimorphism (men are bigger than women, but not as dramatically bigger as in many species) which is usually associated in mammals with a moderate level of polygyny.

What exactly follows from that, I couldn't quite say, but it's pretty unambiguously true notwithstanding some exceptions.

Clash-blogging

From Katherine Jean-Lopez. My world is collapsing.

UPDATE: Link should be fixed.

Rabbit Fur Coat

Thanks to the wonders of the internets, I got my hands on one of these "leaked" copies of Rabbit Fur Coat, the forthcoming solo album from Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley and Postal Service fame, and I have to say that while I like it, I definitely like it less than I like Rilo Kiley's albums. In part, the more-countrified sound doesn't really do it for me. I also think the more countrified subject matter gets a little weak. The genius of RK's better songs, to my way of thinking, is that they get all downbeat and depressed about stuff that's objectively pretty banal. The perfect complement to one's whiny and self-obsessed post-modern urban lifestyle (and by "one's," of course, I mean "my"). More to the point, since I thought The Execution of All Things was better than More Adventurous, I'm now worried that RK may have entered a terminal death-spiral of declining quality. My general feeling is that after three or four good albums, the appropriate thing for a musician to do is die tragically, leaving us wanting more. Re-inventing yourself as a bunch of cartoon characters is better than lingering, but still not the best solution.

"Pulling Out"

Obviously, there's a lot to be said substantively about Iraq, but I'm also left wondering how the debate came to be dominated by the crude sexual metaphor of "pulling out" of Iraq. How about "leaving" or "bringing the troops home" or "ending the war"?

Darwin's Nightmare

I went to see this documentary sometime last week, and while it was pretty well-made and reasonably compelling, I found it extraordinarily nonsensical. Conditions in the lake town that was the subject of the film were clearly quite bad, but it looked far less bad than the typical sub-Saharan milieu. What's more, all the most severe problems had a very direct relationship to the AIDS epidemic which, as we all know, is a huge problem all across Africa and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Nile Perch. The efforts to guilt-trip the local factory owner for exporting fish while there was a looming famine elsewhere in Tanzania were bizarre and nonsensical. All modern famines take place in smallish areas while food surpluses exist elsewhere. And as the film kept noting, the UN World Food Program was raising funds in the West to meet the needs of the famine-stricken region. That's exactly as it should be. If somebody's going to donate food to relieve a famine in Tanzania, it should be the people -- Americans, Europeans, Japanese, etc. -- who have the most resources to spare, not whichever group of non-starving people happens to be closest to the scene of the action.

Everything in the movie was like that -- problems consistently misdiagnosed, blame being tossed around at random, etc. It was especially frustrating because at the moment we're seeing a renewed interest in aiding Africa combined with a churlish and anachronistic anti-aid backlash. This movie was sufficiently annoying, that it kinda sorta made me want to join the backlash.

Christmas-Haters

I'm with Mr. Tannenbaum:

"A Jewcy Chanukah" is but one of many kitschy celebrations that in the past few years have made comedy as much a part of Hanukkah as latkes and sour cream. The irreverent and sometimes R-rated Hanukkah productions, popping up during what many people have called a Jewish hipster moment, are largely a reaction to what many Jews say is an overwhelming amount of Christmas hoopla. Their humor-laden productions attract thousands of young Jews (some of whom have never gravitated toward their own culture before) and, perhaps inadvertently, raise the question of what it means to be Jewish. . . .

Mr. Tannenbaum said he tries to convey his feelings to his Christian friends by asking them to imagine this: "Everywhere you go strangers say to you, 'Merry Ramadan.' Anywhere you go you can't get into a store because people are bowing to Mecca. You'd be an angry minority. You'd be like, 'Enough of this Ramadan all ready.' "

Christmas has gotten out of hand, said Jackie Hoffman, who is starring in "Chanukah at Joe's Pub," a one-woman show. "No one does 'The Sukkot Revue,' " she said, referring to the autumnal Jewish holiday, "because then we're not being badgered." . . .

Hanukkah is a minor, generally child-centered holiday that celebrates the victory of the Jews over the Syrian Greeks around 165 B.C. No classic Hanukkah films or ballets were inspired by it. There is no "Miracle on Hester Street," no "Radio City Hanukkah Spectacular." Jewish songwriters have been more inclined to compose Christmas songs, including many of the most beloved: "White Christmas" (Irving Berlin), "The Christmas Song: Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" (Mel Tormé) and "We Need a Little Christmas" (Jerry Herman), to name but three. Adam Sandler's 1995 "Hanukkah Song," in which he enumerates Jewish (and semi-Jewish) celebrities, is the closest thing to a mainstream Hanukkah tune.

I always thought of them as more "Greek Syrians" than "Syrian Greeks." They were culturally Greek, but lived in Syria. Italian-Americans (and African-Americans, etc.) live in America. So the people in question should be Greco-Syrian.

Jesus Hates Cowards

Little did I know that Brio isn't the only Christer teen mag on the web. There's also Realiteen whose advice columnist is doing his best to ensure that we timid men will fare poorly after the Christian ascendancy:

DEAR DUSTY, I have a guy that I've liked for a long time now. Some of my friends say that he likes me, and to go for it, but some say to stay back and wait for him. How can I tell which way to go? -- Jessi

Dear Jessi -- I'll say this much. It may sound like a good idea to "go for it" and essentially get the relationship rolling, but it might not be your best move. If your friends are right about him liking you, then what's keeping him from pursuing you? By waiting for him to make a move towards you, youíre allowing him the benefit of the chase -- something guys love. You'll also set a standard of him being a leader in the relationship --Dusty

A kind of harmonic convergence with the He's Just Not That Into You school of thought, though there's probably little love lost between the Christian Right and Sex and the City. It seems to me that the best dating advice to offer teens is just to lower expectations -- whatever you do, it won't work out, and you'll be all upset, and then you'll get over it and life moves on.

Hump My Tunnel

Everybody (but me, that is) hates "My Humps." But everyone loves the Arcade Fire. So everyone needs to go check out Stereogum's Black Eye Peas / Arcade Fire mashup, "Hump My Tunnel."

Via Adrienne.

White Men Can't Get Compared

With no disrespect to [Adam] Morrison, the habit of anointing every young white player the second coming of Larry Bird has to stop. It's bad for the Bird wannabes and it's bad for Bird himself.

So saith Josh Levin. But does every promising white player actually get compared to Larry Bird? It seems weird to me to do a whole column on the subject of white NBA players and not mention that last year's MVP and last year's top draft pick were both white guys. And, I think, not white guys who attracted tons of comparisons to Larry Bird. As a whole, the article seems to me to greatly understate the number of very good white players in the league today. He kinda sorta mentions this at the end, but what you don't have nowadays are any white American stars. Instead you've got your Nowitzkis, Ginobilis, Gasols, Nashes, etc. That's really a more interesting topic, too, since I don't see an obvious candidate for explanation.

Artest Trade

The other NBA news, of course, is that Ron Artest is demanding a trade. I'm usually not very friendly to the management cartels in sports, but I don't like the impact these outbreaks of demands have on the league. They result in trades that are almost invariably clearly unequal, which is too bad. The Artest case doesn't fit this model, but particularly pernicious are situations when star quality players succeed in whining their way off of bad teams (think Vince Carter and Toronto) since this makes it super-hard for bad teams to ever get good. That said, my head's now busy dreaming of Artest for Daniels+Jeffries and a newfound defense toughness on the Wizards.

Hot Hot Heat

So...Pat Riley will coach the Heat. It's hard to disagree with the general tone of the coverage indicating that this is kind of a scumbag move. But on the other hand, why shouldn't Riley coach the Heat? He's a great coach, he already works for the Heat, so there's a clear logic to it. I'm not familiar with any real evidence that bad coaching (as opposed to ill-timed injuries) have been an actual problem for the Heat, but most teams would love to have Riley as a coach, so why shouldn't Miami?

Oedipus

Never take your literary cues from the MSM. Newsweek, for example, remarks that "It is not necessary to read Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to see Bush's reaction to his father's presidency." They're thinking, obviously, of Freud's writing on the "Oedipus complex" which were, in turn, a reference to Sophocles' play. But there isn't actually anything in the play, the whole point of which was that Oedipus didn't know who his parents were, about father-son relations. Interesting article, though.

Cue Bar

The newest addition to nightlife in MidCity the U Street Corridor is a place called Cue Bar, which recently had a "soft opening" in the former location of Between Friends. You've got beer (including the goofy new aluminum Budweiser bottlecans), you've got pool tables, you've got projection televisions, and -- best of all from my point of view -- there's a ping pong table. Check it out. Allegedly, a jukebox will be installed at some point. So far, though, they've been playing some kind of XM Radio station dedicated to '90s songs.

What Kind of a Person...

... scores 24 points on 5-24 shooting? Goes one for 11 (!) from behind the arc? A really good free throw shooting, I suppose. Plus, it's preferable to Antawn Jamison's six points on 3-17 shooting. Considering those two factors, it's a minor miracle the game was so close. What does Caron Butler need to do to make it into the starting lineup?

Bullshit

Apparently, some business types are trying to rename my neighborhood "MidCity." Wtf? As the post says, U Street has always been U Street! My only complaint is that so far this controversy doesn't seem to be racially charged enough -- it seems to me that the renaming effort is an effort to expunge the area's African-American heritage. Or, even if it isn't, all controversies are better when racially charged.

Politics and Movies

I find it mighty . . . convenient that Leon Wieseltier thinks Munich has objectionable views on Israel and also happens to be a poorly-made film. Obviously, some movies are both aesthetically and politically objectionable, but while Steven Spielberg is far from my favorite director, I find it pretty implausible that he would direct a straight-up bad movie. His track record is remarkably consistent so I think the ex ante probability that the movie is at least okay is enormously high. One suspects that Wieseltier just really objects to the movie's politics -- one knows he has very strong feelings about Israel -- and that's all that's going on here. I suppose I'm also bitter about last year's thousand-man TNR pile-on against The Passion which I thought was both somewhat anti-semitic and very clearly an innovative, well-executed film.

At any rate, I genuinely know almost nothing about the terrorist attacks and Israel's countermeasures, but one has to imagine that a cinematic depiction of those events that took a "moral clarity"-laden pro-Israel line would, in fact, be phenomenally boring. Such a story would, if fictional, just be regarded as pretty silly action movie fodder where the white hats hunt down a bunch of black hats. The only reason you might think the historical events were an appealing subject for a film would have to be that you thought there was something morally complicated about them.

A Dream Come True

You can now -- at last -- download episdoes of Knight Rider for viewing on your iPod. And to think they haven't managed to invent thinking, talking cars yet.

Even More Yao

Someone or other on TNT just remarked that Stromile Swift needs to be Charles Oakley to Yao's Patrick Ewing.

You get these Ewing comparisons, of course, because Jeff Van Gundy is the coach and Ewing himself is an assistant coach. But really it doesn't make much sense. Ewing is seven feet tall. A player six inches shorter than him would be 6'6" and you'd never compare him to Ewing. But Yao is six inches taller. If he continues to improve and ever becomes a super-effective player, he's not going to be "like" any of the stars of the past. Indeed, I'd guess that part of the reason people tend to be down on his game despite the solid numbers is precisely that he doesn't fit people's model of how a good center should look on the court. They're looking to see Patrick Ewing, but he's not there. But of course he isn't. Yao is Yao. He's freakishly huge. His moves don't "look right" because he's radically taller than the people he's getting compared to. Why he can't block shots, I couldn't say.

Yao and Ewing

Chris Mannix writes:

Yao's development -- or lack thereof -- may prove to be the highlight of Van Gundy's tenure in Houston. Van Gundy is Yao's kind of coach, a slug-it-out game planner whose offense is designed to revolve around the center. He made a career riding Ewing, who for six years under Van Gundy was the focal point of the Knicks offense. If the Rockets run 75 offensive plays per game, Van Gundy would like Yao to touch the ball on 74 of them.

But Yao will never be that kind of player -- he doesn't have the heart for it. It's not his fault, it's just the way he was raised. It wasn't until Yao came to America when he was teenager that he started dunking in games. In China, dunking is considered taboo because it embarrasses your opponents. How do you think trash talking and hard fouls, two components that made Ewing the player he was, were viewed on the mainland? Yao has 20 years of teachings to erase and it will probably take him 20 more to do it.

Obviously, Yao is never going to be just like Patrick Ewing. He's taller and skinnier and more Chinese. That said, when Jeff Van Gundy was coaching him, Ewing was a grizzled veteran. Yao is 25. Ewing was 25 in the 1987-88 season when he averaged 20.2 points, 8.3 rebounds, 3 blocks, and 1.5 assists. This year, Yao is averaging 19.4 points, 9 rebounds, 1.5 blocks, and 1.4 assists. Ewing was only very marginally better. Already, Yao's worst free throw shooting season is better than Ewing's best. What's more, Yao's number show slow-but-real improvement in every season. Ewing, by contrast, was essentially flat for his first three seasons. Now Yao's numbers are considerably worse than Ewing's best seasons, but he is developing and is at about the same level Ewing was at given equal ages. So I don't see any particular reason to rule out the idea that he'll be as good.

The thing I would say is that the league has changed an awful lot. Running the offense through a big, stout center in the low post was a pretty common strategy when I grew up watching Ewing, and it's become very rare. Maybe it's become rare because there are fewer people around who can play that game. Or maybe it's become rare because it was proven to be a poor strategy. I tend to think the former, however. Ewing was, at best, the third-best center in the league at his prime and he was way more effective than the number three pure center from last season.

"My Humps"

Sometimes, a review can be a brilliant literary success and still be totally wrong. That's how I would classify Hua Hsu's trashing of "My Humps," which is a perfectly good pop song, albeit something that will probably be forgotten in a couple of years. The usually sound Robert Farley, however, agrees with Hsu, which gave me some pause. But I listened to it again and, yes, it's a decent tune.

The Ever-Growing Blogosphere

Via Jonathan Adler, Elisha Cuthbert has a blog. The good news is that she's hot. The bad news is that the blog is about . . . professional hockey, which despite my enthusiasm for Canadian stuff I can't bring myself to pay attention to. Also, she uses an awful lot of exclamation points.

"Irony"

I don't think this even qualifies as Alanis-irony:

A quarter Jewish himself (although he didn't know it), Lenin unabashedly admired the "great, universally progressive traits in Jewish culture: its internationalism and its responsiveness to the advanced movements of the age." Ironically, Jews were at first more numerous among the Mensheviks. But once the Revolution and Civil War got under way, Jews flocked to the Bolsheviks because they were the only ones who took a strong line against anti-Semitism.

That doesn't seem ironic. It also has a curious way of eliding the small point that "once the Revolution and Civil War got under way" being a Menshevik wasn't exactly good for one's health, so it's not all that hard to imagine why people may have switched sides.

Young Detroit

Greg Anthony says, in re: the Pistons, "people forget this is a young basketball team and still improving." Young? Really? Let's look at the starters and their birthdays:

Ben Wallace: 1974

Rasheed Wallace: 1974

Tayshaun Prince: 1980

Richard Hamilton: 1978

Chauncey Billups: 1976.

Off the bench you have Antonio McDyess (1974), Carlos Arroyo (1979), Maurice Evans (1978) and guys who hardly ever play. Considering that guys like Dwayne Wade and LeBron James are superstars, I'm not sure that even Prince counts as notably young by NBA standards. To be sure, there are young players -- Darko, Delfino, Maxiel, Acker -- on the roster, but none of them are serious contributors.

UPDATE: Note that in the same piece, he also refers to the much younger Bulls as a young team. The oldest Bull who plays regularly, Nocioni, was born in 1979, younger than all-but-one of the major Pistons' contributors.

Reporting at Work

I recommend this post by my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta which starts with a specific response to a criticism of one of her articles and moves on to make a more general point about reporting, specifically in the sort of magazine-format she and I work with. As she says, in the blogosphere a lot of what one sees is a kind of culture clash between people with an academic (or, I would add, legal) background and the way magazine articles are produced. There's no good way to reproduce the sort of scholarly apparatus you see in an academic essay or legal brief in a magazine article. Whole conversations or, often, conversations with many people, often supported by a good deal of supplemental reading and various off-the-record or merely informal exchanges get distilled into a quotation or two.

I would, however, be a bit more generous than Garance to our critics on the internet. In part, what we're seeing is what she points to -- misunderstanding on the part of readers of what's going on. In part, though, this misunderstanding comes from genuine limitations of the form. Real compromises are made in the name of readability and space constraints and there's often no way a reader can tell whether someone's work is good or shoddy, it comes down to a matter of trust. This is one thing I like a lot about writing for the internet -- you can link to a lot of the stuff you're talking about instead of referring to it vaguely or relying on it in a non-transparent way.

The LeeVees

If you, like me, have been having some trouble getting into the holiday Christmas spirit, the indie-pop Hanukkah-themed stylings of The LeeVees may be just the cure the doctor ordered.

Boris Diaw

So...I don't think I saw any Hawks games last season and haven't seen much of the Suns this year, but is it really true that Mike D'Antoni switched Boris Diaw from point guard to center? I thought I heard that said on TV last night, which sounded crazy, but if it's true D'Antoni should get a Nobel Prize or something.

Run!

I've been trying to tell certain Vince Young-loving Longhorns in my circle that we had a really great rushing quarterback at Harvard by the name of Ryan Fitzpatrick, but did they listen? Of course not. And who's scrambling for an NFL touchdown now? Ah, yes. To review:

Led the Ivy League in total offense (243.4 yards per game) and pass efficiency rating (128.9) ... Was fourth in the Ivy League in passing average (198.6 yards per game) and was 10th in rushing (44.8 yards per game) - the only non-running back ranked in the top 10 ... Completed 18 of 25 passes for 263 yards and a touchdown against Brown as Harvard erased a 31-10 third-quarter deficit to win, 35-34 ... Passed for a season-high 317 yards (19-35-1) and rushed for a season-high 102 yards to lead Harvard past Cornell, 34-24 ... Cornell head coach Jim Knowles noted after the game, "They were one player better than us today, and that was Fitzpatrick. They were better than us by Fitzpatrick."

In truth, it's been a pretty shaky game. Nevertheless....

Blame Yao

This Bill Walton column references the sorry state of the Houston Rockets several times and invariably implies that said sorry state is largely attributable to poor play by Yao Ming. Before the season started, John Hollinger wrote:

One of the strangest subplots of the season came when Houston struggled at the start of the year. Out of nowhere, a lot of "What is wrong with Yao Ming?" articles started popping up, as though it was clearly Yao's fault that Charlie Ward needed a walker to get across halfcourt. In truth, Yao already was well on his way to his best season as a pro and has shown slow but steady improvement in his three pro campaigns.

This is still true today. Yao is scoring 19.3 points per game along with 9.1 rebounds, 1.3 assists, and 1.6 blocks. Almost every team would be glad to have a performer like that at center. The problem isn't that Yao is playing badly, it's that everyone else is playing terribly. Look here at how absolutely awful the Rockets are when Yao is off the floor.

Matt's War on Christmas

Jonah Goldberg:

Just this week, the Capitol performed its own minor Christmas miracle of transubstantiation. At the beginning of the week, House Speaker Denny Hastert unveiled a "holiday tree." But a few days later, after some entirely predictable bah humbugs, he rechristened it a "Christmas" tree. (Similarly, when the city of Boston tried to unveil its official "Holiday tree," the premier of Nova Scotia, which had provided it as a gift, called it a nifty trick since, "when it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree.")

That's silly, of course.

But here's what genuinely bugs me about Christmas. The roommate came home last night with some Christmas décor and I said something like "ugh." His reply was something about how I need to get into the holiday spirit. And there's the rub.

It seems to me, really, that the whole Christmas spectacular would be much better if it just went unapologetically as "Christmas." If someone wants to know why I'm not in the Christmas spirit the answer is easily enough: not Christian, don't celebrate the day, no spirit. The "holiday season" has a weirdly insidious universalizing effect. Nobody's tricked into thinking it's anything other Christmas, but all of a sudden it's for all of us instead of merely the overwhelming majority of us. There's nothing wrong, really, with an overwhelming majority lording it over a small minority in such trivial ways as putting decorated conifers all over the place, but one might as well be clear on what's going on.

CW: Probably Correct

Watching the Spurs-Mavs game last night, it was easy to forget that their second-best player was on the bench injured. The sort of depth San Antonio often seems to me to be an underappreciated factor. When Shaq gets hurt and the Heat become only okay, or when McGrady goes down and the Rockets become terrible, the tendency is to take that sort of thing into account as an excuse. "Well, they're better than that, Player X is hurt," etc. Which is true, as far as it goes. But injuries are, of course, a bona fide part of the game. The Heat were badly damaged in last year's playoffs by Shaq and Wade not being at 100 percent, and the reality of the situation is that it's actually highly unlikely that the team will be able to get through an entire playoff schedule without their two guys getting banged up somewhere along the way.

Which brings me to the Pistons, who are clearly an awesome team. The difference, however, seems to me to be that they're much more vulnerable to "bad luck" than the Spurs would be. Obviously, San Antonio without Duncan just isn't going to be the same team. But they have sufficient depth to more-or-less shrug off problems with anyone else. Detroit's not like that. Missing any of their five starters, you've suddenly got a radically weaker team. They've avoided that outcome for the past two seasons, but will their luck hold up?

Tests

What I never understand about reporting on test score results is that it's hard to see why you should care at all about fourth grade performance. It's not as if, as a country, we have a ton of fifth grade dropouts and we want to make sure they're equipped with adequate skills. It's the final product that matters, right?