Matthew Yglesias

Optimism in DC

I'm glad Grunfeld and Jordan are optimistic about the Wizards, but I don't really see why "the return of Jarvis Hayes, who appeared in only 21 games last season" would play a role in that. I don't recall a single moment during the playoffs this year when I thought to myself "If only Jarvis Hayes was healthy..." and got that misty look in my eyes. Seeing as how the starting lineup already includes three (Jamison, Butler, Jeffries) small forwards, they don't really need a backup. I guess it looks different if someone decides they want to throw a lucrative offer to Jeffries.

The Great New Wonderful

If you read the movie's underlying concept, "The Great New Wonderful weaves five stories against the backdrop of an anxious and uncertain post-9-11 New York City" you'll probably think to yourself "damn that sounds stupid." And, indeed, it doesn't work at all. At all. It's terrible.

But the movie is actually pretty good. The five stories are all kind of awesome, and even though the "weaving" doesn't work or make sense, it doesn't really undercut the enjoyability of watching it. The acting is all solid, the dialogue is funny, the pacing is good, and generally it's worth your time and cash. I do have some fear that it might be "too New York" and that people who haven't lived there might be down on it. The director, Danny Leiner, is the veteran of such classics as Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Dude, Where's My Car?, two of the better inane comedies of the 21st century. Were he to develop a more artistically ambitious concept than those that didn't happen to involve obviously bad idea of tossing around nonsensical 9/11 references, I think it'd be really, really good.

Draft, Draft!

Hmmm...I feel like I should be expressing opinions on this draft, but I don't have any real sources of information about it apart from what I've read on the usual spots. So folks should comment away, maybe someone has something more interesting to say. I will note that the Wizards already drafted two tall dudes -- Peter John Ramos, Andray Blatche -- considered to be in need of development who they proceeded to not play at all. Now they've added two more such dudes -- Pecherov and Veremeenko -- and I wonder if any of them are going to get playing time at all. Now, obviously, you don't want to put guys on the floor who can't contribute. But if you're not going to put the guys on the floor, how are they supposed to develop? I dunno. It might make sense to keep at least one white dude on the roster just as a good luck charm or something.

Superman Returns

Saw it last night with some people including Sanchez, whose remarks I largely endorse. First off, I should say that I had simply assumed that, as with Batman Begins, they were just going to reboot the franchise. Instead, plot-wise this is a sequel to the previous Superman II but, as Julian says, it often feels like an adaptation or remake of the Superman movie rather than an adaptation of the comic book. Filmicly it has a lot of good qualities, along with some pacing problems (it's very long) and, I think, a rather elementary plot hole. Further stuff below the fold.

Plot-wise, the key thing involves Lex Luthor growing a giant kryptonite island off the East Coast of the United States. The thing about this is that while it's a very large challenge for Superman, there's no reason at all to think that the United States Navy couldn't just send some boats to the vicinity and blow Luthor and the gang up. The movie even contained some expository dialogue explaining that this wouldn't work because Lex would be in possession of advanced Kryptonian technology, but then they forgot to ever give him advanced Kryptonian technology.

At any rate, I would have been much happier with a reboot. The vast bulk of the interesting Superman storylines deal with the ethical/political implications of that kind of vast power. The comic books tapped into this well by reconceptualizing Lex Luthor not as an evil mad scientist, but as a kind of evil corporate titan and then later politician. That provides a real reason that the villain might pose a challenge to Superman. No matter how invulnerable to bullets or how strong you are, it's extremely hard to combat a foe who enjoys public legitimacy so you can't legally stop him just by kicking ass. This winds up tying in to the core issue. It's fine for, say, Batman to evade the law in pursuit of higher ethical aims precisely because Batman isn't especially powerful. A Superman unconstrained by law and answering only to his own conscience would be a massive threat.

All this stuff has been regularly treated by the comics in a variety of forms -- stories about Batman trying to develop hedges against Superman's massive power, stories about Superman considering whether he shouldn't try to resolve systemic social/political powers, alternate reality storylines where Superman sets himself up as a dictator, etc. At the end of the day, it's not the very deepest ethical question out there, but it's an okay one and could certainly stand a cinematic treatment.

Even more frustratingly, Superman Returns sort of hints it's going to go there. We keep hearing about Lois Lane's famous editorial "Why The World Doesn't Need Superman" but we never learn what the content of that essay was.

The Ways of Gilbertology

Arenas says he'd be willing to take a pay cut if that would let the Wizards sign an impact free agent:

We can't step back. We can't have another situation where we let Larry Hughes get away. If we have to go get a free agent, let's go. I'll take a pay cut. I was a second-round pick so I didn't expect to be where I am anyway. I'm not greedy but I do want to win a championship and I want to do it here, with the Wizards. That's why you play.

I was going to say I don't find it especially credible to think that having Larry Hughes would have made last year's team much better, but of course some of the losses to to Cleveland were so close that even tiny changes could easily have put the Wiz in the second round. Looking to the future, were it actually possible to bring Ben Wallace back to DC one could imagine that dramatically improving the team. That said, Gilbert's prone to saying crazy stuff and my guess is that his agent will have a thing or two to say about this scheme.

All Alone

Sebastian Mallaby says Americans are lonelier than ever:

The question about loneliness is: Why do people do this to themselves? Why do Americans, who reported an average of nearly three close friends in 1985, now report an average of just over two? And why does one in four have nobody with whom to discuss personal issues? This is the age of Oprah and MySpace, of public emoting on television and the Web. Apparently people watch "Friends" but don't actually have many.

I'd be interested in seeing a demographic breakdown -- is this just an artificat of population aging? I feel like I have lots of friends (thankfully) and that technology and so forth have done a lot to facilitate that.

UPDATE: Here's the underlying paper where, being highly trained professional sociologists, they turn out to have done the appropriate demographic corrections and so forth.

Social Hedonists

I took the Environics Research survey and turn out to be somewhere between a social hedonist and an autonomous post-materialist. I've actually gone fairly thick into the weeds of this particular survey, and one noteworthy thing about it is that all the Gen X groups sound really unappealing to me. Along with those two there are the "security-seeking aescetics," the "aimless dependents," the "thrill seeking materialists," and the "new aquarians." That all sounds like crap. Pre-boomers get much better possibilities like "rational traditionalist" or "cosmopolitan modernist."

What's more, I think it's a real stretch to call me part of Generation X anyway, but they don't seem to have considered the possibility that anyone from mighty Gen Y would be taking their test. So screw the whole thing.

Aaron Spelling, R.I.P.

I had no idea he worked on Moesha. Remember Moesha? Obviously, 90210 changed my life. I also recall that the dubbing on episodes of Dallas being broadcast on Russian television circa 1998 was so poorly done that you could hear almost all of the underlying English dialogue making it one of the few shows I watched the summer I was over there. Never got the Melrose Place bug somehow.

Save Butterstick!

An important cause. Tai Shan is an American panda, born free on American soil and should under no circumstances be sent back to live under the PRC's repression.

Isiah!

Okay, more basketblogging. The thing about Isiah Thomas taking over the Knicks is that the odds overhwelmingly favor the team slightly improving next season. It's a kind of "nowhere left to go but up" sort of situation -- last year's squad was very near the theoretically maximum level of badness. All Thomas really needs to do is avoid totally alienating his players, and the team will do a bit better. Nothing will, of course, actually get solved this way, but that's how it'll roll.

Basically, the team's only hope is for people holding pricey season tickets to start dropping their packages. Then you might get serious change. Plus, my dad would get the chance to move into better seats. It's hard to imagine from the outside, but the team has actually suffered shockingly few consequences as a business from its lamentable performance over the past several years. Since the team is, at the end of the day, a business, that's what counts.

Ah, Germany

K-Capps breaks out the "United States Fails Nuremberg Trial" pun. But just imagine if we'd manage to go down 2-1 and then eventually win 2-3. Then we could have written about the "Nuremberg Rally." Realistically, events probably shouldn't be held in Germany, it just leads to Nazi jokes.

A Prairie Home Companion

I went into this film with some trepidation. After all, I don't really like the radio show very much, so why would I go see the movie? Well, because my friends wanted to go and I didn't have any better ideas. It also fit in well with a weird Minnesota theme that had been running through the day, but the key plank in that operation is off the record so I shan't say more. The obvious turns out to be correct here -- if you don't like the show, you'll find the film kind of dull. My vague hope that because The Player is awesome, Robert Altman would pull something magical out of his ass and transform a radio show I don't like into a genius film was dashed. It was all very well made, but it was still a movie that fundamentally spends a lot of time just portraying a radio that I don't care for. Dullsville. I should say, though, that considering my basic loathing of folk music it actually contained some good tunes.

Garrison Keillor's writing, meanwhile, I often enjoy especially, as Emily reminds me, his demolition of American Vertigo.

I Was Wrong

Well, obviously, Miami won. Beyond that, my predictions this postseason were terrible. I'm not sure I put all this in writing, but I thought the Wiz would beat the Cavs. I thought Clippers would beat the Suns. I thought the Spurs would beat the Mavs. I thought Detroit would beat Miami. I mean, I successfully called such nail-biters as Detroit's triumph over the Bucks but pretty much every call where reasonable people could disagree I got wrong.

The good news, for folks annoyed by all the basketblogging (i.e., my friends) is that there should be much, much, much less for months and months now.

Officiating

I share some concerns about the officiating in Game 5, but I think Bill Simmons' rant at the end of his column loses some perspective. To recap what we all know, this is the end of the second season since the Association reinterpreted the rules in a way that's significantly advantaged quick perimeter players. Dwyane Wade has been the major beneficiary of this change, but it's clearly a systemic effect, not something targeted at him. Other quick guards -- Arenas and Parker come to mind -- have suddenly become much more valuable players. Longtime stars like Allen Iverson (TS% .532 last year and .543 this year compared to . 518 when he won the MVP and .512 career) and Kobe Bryant (TS% . 563 and .559 -- the two best of his career) have suddenly become much more efficient scorers. One could argue that this is poor league policy, but it's a league-wide policy decision, not poor officiating.

Now if you look at how Dallas has been playing, you see a lot of Dirk shooting fadeaways rather than taking it to the rim. You see Dallas' perimeter guys shooting a lot of jumpers. You see Dallas never trying to pass to Dampier or Diop in the post. Maybe this is a strategic error on the Mavs' part or maybe it's not. But I think it's almost certainly related to the fact that Miami has the intimidating duo of Shaq and 'Zo anchoring the perimeter defense while Dallas' centers are non-factors on offense until after the shot goes up. The Heat have also been playing a reasonable amount of zone. Maybe all this notwithstanding, the Mavs are being irrationally hesitant to challenge the Heat centers. Or maybe not. But the particulars of the final call aside, the basic reasons Miami is getting so many more free throws is that Dallas is fouling Shaq a lot (which is smart) and Wade is taking much more advantage of the new rules than anyone on Dallas is.

Worse and Worse

Connie Chung sings "Thanks for the Memories"



It's freakier than a humanzee. Via Steve Clemons.

Humanzee

Olivia Judson in her New York Times quasi-blog asks the important question: "What would happen if we crossed humans with chimpanzees?" The answer:

Humans and chimpanzees have been evolving independently for 4 to 6 million years. This suggests that some sort of hybrid child might be possible. Even if sex couldn’t produce one (it doesn’t in a lot of human couples, after all), in vitro fertilization might work.

However, female chimpanzees are much, much more promiscuous than human females. So, assuming you could get fertilization, here’s my prediction: if the chimpanzee were the father, the pregnancy would be extremely dangerous for the mother. Probably, few pregnancies could be carried to term. Any children that did result would be huge. In contrast, if the human were the father, the children would be small, and both mother and child would be more likely to survive.

I say we go for it. For more on Humanzees, see this report into Stalin's efforts to breed a race of half-man, half-ape superwarriors and the thrilling tale of Oliver, once thought to be a real-life Humanzee, though this turned out not to be the case.

Still Dallas

I'm sticking with the Mavericks. Home court advantage in the NBA is real, and two of Dallas' three road losses have been very close while neither of their home wins were, so I think they can still close this out in Texas.

Josh Howard

That's some dumb, dumb, dumb decision-making. I feel like there have been a remarkably large number of mental errors of this sort -- people forgetting how much time's on the clock, how many timeouts they have, etc. -- during this year's playoffs.

Tremendous Upside Potential

Tyrus Thomas is Chad Ford's number one pick. Ford also thinks he's "the least ready of the top prospects to contribute right away." So why is he number one? Because "he's got the most upside of anyone in the draft."

I haven't made a big study of it, but how often does that sort of thinking really pan out? Especially, how often does it pan out for the team that did the drafting? Taking risks on "project"-types seems eminently reasonable if you have a not-so-hot draft pick, but it seems like a hell of an odd gamble with a number one choice.

Lists

The ordinal list is truly the last refuge of the damned. Fifty best magazines, to be sure, but what kind of sense at all does it make to say that Mother Jones just barely edges out Men's Health but isn't quite as good as Cottage Living?

"Catastrophe Keeps Us Together"

Title track of Rainer Maria's underrated recent album.

Tied Up

Let me just say that despite the recent trend, I still think Dallas is going to win. There's a lot of home court advantage in the NBA, and shit happens. But Dallas has still played better than Miami over the life of the series, was still the better team during the regular season, and still has the home court advantage. Obviously, this is by no means the walkover it looked for a little while like it was going to be (which is nice from a fan's perspective, though I sort of wanted to see the objectively evil Heat get crushed) and the Heat certainly could win, but the Mavericks probably will in the end, even if it takes them seven games.

Drafty

Not being a fan of the college basketball, I don't have real opinions about the players in the draft. I did watch one Bennetton Treviso Euroleague game on NBA TV and Bargnani seemed good. But that's about it. My only real source of information so far has been Chad Ford on ESPN.com and I hope I'm not alone in finding him utterly unenlightening. Pretty much everyone is "long" and "athletic" -- perhaps not coincidentally the only exceptions seem to be the white guys -- so there's no way to distinguish anyone fro anyone else. Is there a better source of information out there. I will observe that there doesn't seem to be enough weight placed on defense when people talk about prospects. Two of last year's bad teams, Toronto and Seattle, actually had top five offensive efficiencies combined with appalling defense. They're not going to get anywhere trying to improve their offenses from such a high level.

Resigning

I see I stand accused of neglecting the high marginal tax rates in Canada in my Dwayne Wade post. Not really -- I gladly concede that financially Wade should stay in Miami. The question is what should Wade do if he wants to win a lot of championships. I think that he signs with the Heat he'll find that two years from now the salaries being paid to him, Shaq, Williams, and Walker don't leave much cash for other players and Shaq will be a shadow of his current self (which is, in turn, a shadow of his former self) while Williams and Walker will be bad. By contrast, if he goes to Toronto he'll be playing his prime years on what would be a crackerjack team especially since Bosh will presumably no longer be disgruntled under those circumstances. Some have suggested Orlando might be a better destination than Toronto, which may be true -- the Raptors and the Magic don't get on national television so I've seen very little of either team and don't know much about comparing them.

The guy who really should relocate, though, is Kevin Garnett who presumably could demand a trade and try to wind up in Chicago. It's even possible that such a move would be good on the merits for Minnesota which is mired in an endless sea of hopelessness at the moment and could hope to get lucky with a bunch of Bulls draft picks. By all accounts, though, he really wants to stay in Minnesota, which seems odd.

Comeback!

Objectively speaking, the Heat are evil. Nevertheless, nice comeback and it'll certainly be more fun to watch a real series than the Dallas walkover we seemed to be headed for.

Boot Camp

I got Windows XP to run on my MacBook Pro using this Boot Camp business. I'd never really used XP before -- I've been a Mac owner for years, use my laptop at work, and even the college paper I worked on was Mac-based. It kind of sucks. I mean, maybe it's great for something or other, but everything's mighty ugly. Plus, I keep forgetting I need to hit control-c to copy (or "s" to save or whatever") instead of using my Apple button.

Wade's Extension

I thought it was interesting that nobody on this ESPN panel thought it would be a mistake for Dwyane Wade to sign an extension with Miami. From a strict financial point of view, signing an extension is clearly the right move, but shouldn't someone be taking up the "try and win lots of championships?" point of view. The Heat have very big financial commitments not only to rapidly-aging Shaq but also to over-the-hill Antoine Walker and Jason Williams extending for years into the future. I feel like the Miami championship window is shutting as we watch.

By contrast, it seems to me that if Wade's agent were to place a well-timed call to Bryan Colangelo he could be playing alongside Chris Bosh and Andrea Bargnani in Toronto in a couple of years and they'd be dominating the league. Personally, I'd take guaranteed money over the risk of a catastrophic injury, but someone in sportswriterdom ought to be a purist.

Argyle Academy

Funny cartoons by Mike Lowery. I like them so much I bought one yesterday.

Where's Shaq?

After a days-long interregnum during which all we heard was that Miami needed to get the ball to Shaq more, they managed to . . . get the ball to Shaq less than ever. We all know Diesel's past his prime, but having five dudes on the team get more field goal attempts than him is a bit ridiculous. I can never quite tell what the deal is when you see a squad not feeding the post when it seems like they should, but I imagine the descent of his free throw shooting from "bad" to "incredibly awful" is spilling over and wrecking his overall game.

Fluid Dynamics

I suppose it's better than being robbed at gunpoint as happened to Kriston last week, but walking home from Tom & Catherine's party last night, somebody took it upon themselves to chuck a big ol' cup of fast food soda at me from across ninth street. Since Emily had already poured beer on my head while trying to pretend to pour beer on my head for a photo (vengeance was mine), it was really no harm done especially as the way this works is that the vast majority of the soda spilled onto the street while the cup was en route. The guy's aim was, however, quite impressive especially considering the poor lighting and generally inauspicious circumstances.

Thinking it over, I think if you want to attempt this move it's important to really get the cup rotating in the air around the correct axis. That way, centripetal force keeps the ice in the cup and gives the overall cup-ice-soda object sufficient mass to prevent air resistance from halting the cup's flight.

World Cup!

The absence of stoppages in play is kind of disorienting to me. The absence of commercials is nice, but it makes it hard to learn the sport. The natural thing would be to run lots of replays and analysis -- just like in basketball games, football games, etc. -- but dumb the level of analysis down for an American audience, but the opportunity doesn't really exist.

It's interesting how normal soccer players look. They're clearly somewhat taller and fitter than most people, but they really do just look like tallish dudes in good shape much as you might find walking down the street somewhere.

We Are Wolves

Cool band, dig the album, love Canadians. But does the world really need two Montreal-based bands with wolf-themed names? What's the deal?

Haslem Again

That post immediately below's not looking very prescient now, is it?

Haslem on Dirk

I'm a little confused by Miami's plan to have Udonis Haslem guard Dirk Nowitzki. Obviously, this is a bad matchup for everyone, but normally teams have the most success finding a relatively tall perimeter player with long arms. Haslem's about the right height to be a relatively tall perimeter player, but he isn't actually a relatively tall perimeter player -- he's a relatively short interior defender. Seems to me like it'll be the worst of both worlds.

Chez Schwartz

Jim's post on his trip to Montreal reminded me of one of the sillier things in the world, which you can see illustrated by following this link. That the website for an establishment that, rather clearly, ought to be called "Schwartz's Deli" -- it's a deli, it's run by Anglophones, and the dude who started it is named Schwartz. But as you can see, due to the odd Québec language rules, you can't have signs with possessives (that's English) so the sign outside the place labels it "Chez Schwartz Charcuterie" which is just stupid.

Meanwhile, as you can also see, they seek to rollback this linguistic injustice as far as feasible. Their website's URL is "schwartzsdeli.com" and on the cite they have a logo referring to the business as "Schwartz's Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen." But not on the sign. God no!

At any rate, I do like me some Montreal-style bagels.

Good Players on Bad Teams

As you can read here and here according to the Wins Produced model, we have just finished "the fourth consecutive season Garnett has been the most productive player in the NBA." Garnett's production has actually declined somewhat each year of that streak, but he's always been the most productive. What's changed has been his teammates' production, so they played pretty well in 2003-2004 and he won the MVP award. But he actually performed slightly better in 2002-2003 and pretty much the same in 2004-2005. To me, this raises the question of whether Garnett hasn't been playing too efficiently for his team's own good during these bad teammates years.

After all, what's important about offensive efficiency is team efficiency not how efficiently any given player plays. And it seems plausible that individual efficiency is at least in part a function of how much you shoot. If LeBron James took the shot literally every time he got the ball, his points per minute might increase, but one would expect the efficiency of his scoring to decline. Insofar as this is true, though, what a star player needs to be doing isn't maximizing his efficiency, but his team's efficiency. Passing up a low-margin shot to pass to an open teammate is a smart play -- unless your teammates are all so bad that you're more likely to hit the bad shot than your teammate is to hit the open one. One wouldn't, for example, want to swing the ball over to Ben Wallace so he can pop an open three pointer.

So take a look at the Timberwolves this year. Their offense was terrible. They scored 99.6 points per 100 possessions, good for 27th in the league (their defense, incidentally, was pretty good at 101.7 per 100 possessions). Garnett himself, though, was very efficient -- scoring his 21.8 points per game on an exemplary .589 TS%. His teammates, however, only posted a .524 -- only six teams were worse. Ideally, I would now site the TS% of the non-Garnett Wolves, but I don't know how to calculate that. Suffice it to say that there were, in the aggregate, a good deal worse than their star player.

Which is all to say that if KG had shot more often, this could have lowered his efficiency while still raising his team's efficiency. And, indeed, we see that his usage rate of 23.3 was relatively low compared to other offensive focal points. LeBron James was at 31.4, Kobe Bryant was at 35.3, and even Elton Brand who played alongside some decent other options was at 24.6.

Now it's conjecture to say so, but it seems to me to be the case that under the circumstances Garnett would have done more to help his team win by playing more selfishly. Nothing he could have realistically done, given his teammates, would have made Minnesota good, but they could have won more. Which sort of fits with the CW on Garnett that though he's extremely good, he can't "take over games" which can be construed as a fancy way of saying he doesn't shoot enough.

Hot Hot Heat

Hmm...like a lot of people, I didn't think the Heat's offseason moves made a ton of sense, though clearly the Shaq-Wade combo was going to keep them good one way or another. Then their performance against Chicago definitely didn't make them look especially finals-bound. And now -- well, they're heading for the finals which is obviously going to tend to make all of Riley's moves look brilliant.

Now I have a rooting conflict of interest in the West. I don't want the Heat to win the championship, and Dallas seems to have a better chance of stopping them. But it would be really interesting to see a Heat-Suns series featuring the Mother of All Mismatches.

A Clarification

Since I'm partially responsible for the confusion, I should say that now having read the whole book, it's true -- The Wages of Wins doesn't argue that Dennis Rodman was better than Michael Jordan. It does argue that Rodman was an underrated player and that, generally speaking, the value of scoring is overstated and the value of rebounding understating. They conclude, however, that the CW on Jordan is more-or-less right. The most controversial Wages claims will probably be the ones about Kevin Garnett, regarding which I'll have more to say later.

A Strange and Exotic Land

The Washington Post, major daily newspaper for a majority African-American city, follows up its explorations of the wingman with an inquiry into the mysterious phenomenon of so-called "black men".

Peppy Mix

Driving to the beach, I was looking around at my friend's CDs and saw one labeled "very peppy mix" and put it in. The songs were pretty peppy, but I wouldn't say very peppy. The telltale flaw is that it had the original version of "Brimful of Asha" even though the far peppier Fatboy Slim remix is well-known and widely available. If you want to say you prefer the un-remixed version, well, then you're wrong but I'll respect your opinion. Nevertheless, there's simply no case to be made for labeling something "very peppy" while avoiding peppier options. I think "Block Rockin' Beats" may be the peppiest song ever. Other suggestions?

Fight Club

In the course of writing about other things, Amanda remarks:

The struggle of the individual man against the dictates of a conformist society is hardly a new story, but what’s really alarming about it as of late is that the conformist society is characterized as a nagging (but pretty) woman and the individual straining against this is characterized as a man whose individuality is just a juvenile affectation. The reason Fight Club had any resonance at all was that it broke the mold some and cast the individual vs. conformist society not as a men vs. women thing but, more realistically, men vs. the corporate conformist machine. And therefore it wasn’t a matter of giving up on your personality in order to obtain a woman’s affections. But, distressingly, it was still characterized as a struggle against emasculation. (The book is probably deeper, but I’ve only seen the movie.)

I haven't seen Fight Club in a while now, but I think this is wrong. What's interesting about it is that it's a rare explicitly anti-individualist work. "Self-improvement is masturbation," remarks Tyler after looking at a Calvin Klein ad (quotes here), while Jack earlier observes that he "had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct." The general idea of this is that "individualism" is a marketing ploy, designed to convince people to buy things like "the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green ying and an orange yang" in order to express and create their identities.

The mere observation that individuality can be coopted by the corporate machine isn't unique -- see, e.g., Commodify Your Dissent -- but Fight Club takes this in an unusual direction. Rather then exhorting people to abjure fake, commercialized individuality in favor of a higher, truer individualism it exhorts people to abandon individualism. While doing something or other, the members of Project Mayhem are told: "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." Rather, "You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else." The ever-repeated theme is that what you need to do is not find yourself, but face The Truth: "This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time." Or, to put it another way, "First, you have to know that someday, you are going to die."

Nash and Nowitzki

In the course of a long article about the two, Marc Stein tries to deny what seems fairly obvious to me -- that these are two great players who play better apart from each other. I think you can see this from the fact that even though Phoenix and Dallas both have excellent offensive efficiency -- 109.4 and 108.7 respectively in the regular season, good for the #1 and #2 spots -- they have very different offenses. Phoenix's 19.7 assist ratio is the highest in the league, while Dallas' 14.8 is second-lowest. In the playoffs, Phoenix is at the top of the list and Dallas is at the bottom.

I think we have good reason to believe that for either guy to be at his maximum effectiveness, his team needs to tilt strongly in one direction or another. That's not to say that putting them together would make a team worse. Tim Thomas has a sort of Dirkish game but he's way worse. If you put Nowitzki in Thomas' place on the Suns' roster and the team kept playing Nash/D'Antoni-style basketball, the team would almost certainly improve. But Nowitzki himself wouldn't be living up to his potential, which is best maximized by lots of isolation plays.

Shocking News

Awesome trend reporting from The Washington Post which clues me in on this new "wingman" phenomenon. Next up -- the kids these days sometimes go to bars and consume alcoholic beverages as a social activity! The sun shines brightly in the day, but not so much at night! It's really fucking humid in this town during the summer!