This time, it's REAL

My space knowledge bona fides are well established on this site, so let's go around the solar system again!

I saw a show on the Discovery Channel yesterday in which plans were detailed to return (NASA, of course--that great spendthrift) to the moon in 2018.

I said, "you mean, GO to the moon for the FIRST TIME!" and then I looked around for somebody to high-five me, but I was alone and nude, so I low-fived my two friends the kiwis. It hurt, but in a John Cougar No Drop the Cougar No Put It Back In Mellancamp "Hurts So Good"-kind of way.

The plot is thinner than an Ethiopian fashion model: send a series of "rockets" into "outer space" and ferry supplies for a "base camp" to the moon. The NASA people actually pointed out that the moon is 25 times further away from the Earth than the space shuttle has ever traveled. Then, they confidently predicted that everything will go off without a hitch. Just for the record, I'm skeptical. *cough!* Mars Rover!! *cough!*

So, in 11 years, get back to me at the retirement home/soylent green plant and let me know what happened.

It's not that I don't like to send people to die on faraway rocks; no, I quite like the thought of sending to the moon some Johnny Navy pilot or Susie Sellout, who's toiled and hustled for Uncle Sam all his or her life, and who has climbed the slippery pole to get to be an astronaut. And then, the poor dumb bastard is at the mercy of solar winds and killer radiation, and all he/she has for a shield is Ray Bradbury and some NASA choad's theoretical physics. Oh, and everybody's optimism. Pray real hard, kids!

I turned the thing off after 30 minutes. Maybe it's feasible. Maybe it will even be done. But laying aside the question of whether NASA is even competent enough to build a working moon base, much less actually get it to the moon and get it set up, the largest objection to this silly mission is that we have plenty of problems here and now, and lunar colonization--even on such a small scale--is irresponsible, pie-(literally) in-the-sky propaganda that distracts from actual issues we must confront. And it's terribly, terribly expensive, at a time when we as a nation don't have gobs of money to wager on efforts that carry no practical application for anyone alive on our planet today.

The clincher was the utter goddamn waste of resources that the NASA folks in the show were for some reason completely proud of. I was stunned to hear, for instance, that they will launch a satellite next year that will orbit the moon and map the surface in great detail, so scientists can determine the best places to land and set up bases.

Well, you might ask, what's bad about that?

Only this: in the next breath, the same fucking scientist who just told me about the mapping project then breathlessly told me about how NASA is determined to make all the astronauts' water, oxygen, and fuel from deposits already on the lunar surface. How can NASA find these deposits? Kaloo-kalay! They have turned the Hubble Telescope around and pointed it at the moon. Hubble can see down to the surface, with infrared technology, and can show detailed, 3-D images of tiny rocks and oxygen deposits and other useful things as part of an overall image of the surface.

Did you get that? The Hubble Telescope can already see the lunar surface in great detail! But NASA apparently didn't figure that out until after it began building the mapping satellite, so now it has both a billion-dollar telescope that's already paid for, doing what it's not meant to do, scanning the moon's surface, and a billion-dollar satellite, doing what it was meant for, but which is the same thing the telescope is already doing.

The presentation in the TV show, which to summarize was, "We've already mapped the surface. Now we desperately need to map the surface!" left no doubt that NASA thinks you are a moron.

Try to put that out of your mind, though, because the next part is equally stupid. How can NASA test for water in the bottoms of craters? After all, as one super-disingenuous scientist facetiously stated, "You can't see the bottoms of craters--they're too dark!" I said, "Why don't you point your infrared telescope at them, you boob--you just got done explaining how Hubble can identify the chemical fingerprints of compounds on the surface!" But the NASA guy had another answer.

Shit, NASA isn't going to use spectrometry or any other science-y technique on this one. NASA instead has spent untold billions of your dollars and mine to build a sensor probe which is going to orbit the moon while its booster rocket detaches, accelerates, and slams into the lunar surface in a giant explosion. Yes, if you're keeping score at home, this is like saying, "I suppose I could perform your biopsy with care and using time-tested techniques that cause the least damage to your body and result in better results. But fuck it, I'm just gonna stick both arms in there and yank like fuck! Yeeee-haaaaaaw!!"

This is what happens when you let nerds have projectiles and there's a deranged fake cowboy in the White House who thinks everybody should be 'splodin' stuff.

Oh, the probe: it'll hang up in space and try to collect and analyze the dust shower that flies up from the surface. Should be lots of water vapor in there once that explosive rocket makes a big fireball.

Why can't we land a probe on the surface and just take a motherfucking sample? Because you're a pussy, that's why!

This pussy turned off his TV. And now I pray real hard that NASA's process for selecting astronauts is like the process for picking US Attorneys: please, God, let them all be Republicans!

The Harder They Fall (1956)

It's in b&w, it's about boxing, and it was Humphrey Bogart's last film. Though he would die of cancer about a year after it came out, Bogart smokes 2 cigarettes within the film's opening five minutes. That's what men used to be like, Dr. Phil: they woke up, yanged blood into a handkerchief, and then lit a smoooooth Carolina coffin nail.

This film has a revolutionary premise: the fight game is crooked.

In 2007, it's hard for us to remember that there was a time, in the way-back machine we call "the 20th century," when young men of the blacker hues were drawn to their urban boxing gyms, just as their miscegenous Irish and German forefathers had been.

And, after a decade--or far less--of dealing brain damage with their fists, and receiving same, they wound up under bridges or in flop houses, in the Army or in jail. As the movie repeats time and again, "promoters are forever, but fighters only last a short time."

Bogart plays a sportswriter who worked at the same paper for 17 years, until it folded. He takes a job out of necessity as fight publicist for promoter Bob Arum--I mean, "Nick Benko" (Rod Steiger), who has a monstrous Argentinian, "Toro Moreno," who's just off the boat and who, with the right amount of fawning press and smoke and mirrors, could make it to the heavyweight title fight based on his freakish size alone.

Benko is a millionaire and a fixer; all of Toro Moreno's opponents are paid to take a dive. Incredibly, Moreno actually gets his title shot within a year. This is, of course, utter lunacy to us today, as our press corps has never once in living memory bought a pre-packaged celebrity and boosted him to the front of his field. I can't think of a single President, Governor, or screen star who is the product of such crass manipulative practices by his or her handlers and the cooperative press.

The Harder They Fall is based upon the career of 6'-7", 275 lb. Primo Carnera, an Italian who compiled a stellar record on the way to a title shot, despite the opinion of many that his opponents were B-list and often seemed to get knocked out by phantom punches. After actually winning the title amidst questionable circumstances, Carnera eventually found himself opposite Max Baer, who knocked Carnera down 12 times and won easily.

Carnera then became a traveling freak show of sorts, eventually forced to retire after his kidneys gave out. His management stole all the money. Today, some have revisited his tale and decided that his fights weren't fixed, but in fact that doubts about his abilities can be attributed to "racism" and "fear of the Other." Not his mob backing or the fact that several opponents admitted to being paid off. Nope. Racism. It's more prevalent than gravity, with twice the staying power.

The film features the same Baer, as the heavyweight champ who demolishes Toro, and former fighter Jersey Joe Walcott (real name, Arnold Cream), as the trainer who tries to keep Toro from being hurt too badly by serious opponents.

Baer, it is interesting to note, plays an Irish champ. Apparently true to his actual character, Baer's "Buddy Brannen" takes great pride in butchering his opponents and declares as much to Bogart's character in the lead-up to the title fight. Baer spoke perfect English, which one could hope gives pause to viewers who also saw Ron Howard's Cinderella Man, in which Baer is portrayed as a Teutonic proto-Nazi who should have just gone up to Jim Braddock and said "I must break you" before the fight. It was so much easier to cast it as America-versus-Europe, I guess, or perhaps just "America!" and any opponent would have been made the heavy since, as history has shown, America is like an eternal truth and needs no context. Ron Howard does not like subtlety. If you asked him whether he wanted mustard or honey mustard on a sandwich, the difference would be too slight for him and he'd yell, "BUTTER!"

Jersey Joe Walcott, the other ex-fighter in the film, who fought over 70 times and finished up 53-18-1, became a referee and many suspected he was also in on fixed fights. In any case, he was a terrible referee; many will recall that he was the referee for Ali-Liston II and failed to begin the count after Ali's "phantom punch" dropped Liston. Consequently, Liston was down for more than 10 seconds while Walcott was wrangling Ali into a neutral corner, and when Liston got up, Walcott was going to let the fight continue. However, somebody got Walcott's attention at ringside--it's unclear whom or how--and he suddenly stepped between the fighters and stopped the bout in Ali's favor. This is the equivalent of calling a 9th-inning homerun a foul ball and then, two innings later, deciding it was a homerun, after all, and ending the game. Except that the umpire never saw the homerun and a fan told him about it between innings.

Because of the phantom punch (which replays show was actually a very fast punch that did land square on Liston's jaw) and Walcott's absurd conduct (he was never again a referee), the fight is considered a likely dirty deal.

But back to the film. As the dork who introduced it on Turner Classic Movies said, Bogart played very quiet, for a couple of reasons: first, he was actually dying while filming it. Second, Rod Steiger is a triple-glazed ham and it's a fucking buffet everytime he's on screen. Third, Bogart is playing a man who has no love of either the fighters or the mob entourage surrounding them--he doesn't care about fame for its own sake, something we as a culture have utterly forgotten. Being a bag man or a hanger-on to a famous friend is now the #1 aspiration of American youth. Our peers and children are dreaming of being crumbums and third-tier losers. What is true today rings false for 1956, however, for the simple reason that Bogart's character needs the money to support his modest and devoted wife (Jan Sterling). Today's crop of human detritus, the barnacles attached to the empty vessels known as celebrities, have no reason for what they do. Hollow existence is enough.

In the end, you can't buy off a good man--or even an indifferent one. When Toro gets into the ring with the real champ, who won't be bought, the South American is dismantled in three rounds and winds up out of the fight game forever. Disgusted, Bogart goes back to writing columns, vowing to clean up boxing by exposing the fraud, the systematic cheating of fighters by their trainers, and the theft of their pay by crooked management. When Benko confronts him with the twin promises that nobody will read his columns and that Bogart himself will be silenced by the mob, the viewer can be sure that it's just a hood realizing his time upon the stage is short, and he's railing one last time at the injustices of temporality.

That last sentence was bullshit, of course. Mike Tyson filed for bankruptcy, and not because he blew it all himself. Larry Holmes had to come out of retirement to fight at age 38 for a $3 million purse--and he was knocked out by Tyson. His final fight was at age 52, not because he wanted it that way, I assure you. Sugar Ray Leonard has money problems; Marvin Hagler quit the sport--too late to avoid the slowdown of his mind--because he couldn't get a seat at the table in the backrooms where the fights are made and won and lost.

No, the public doesn't read columns about real people with real problems. It reads the gossip column, which is about invented personas with fake problems. Even if it was passionate about cleaning up the sport, shouldn't the public's attention be focused elsewhere, on bigger issues that affect us all? Look at it the other way: If there is no interest in preventing wrongdoing in a sport, for Christ's sake, what chance do any of us have with global warming?

Dead Horses

"Dead Horses"--my favorite song off the Rolling Stones' album "Jockey Fingers."

That being neither here nor there, I was thinking about the internet recently and realized that something about net neutrality puzzles me.

When the telephone was first made available to the public, it was not on a universal basis. Certain people had telephones (like the drugstore) because they paid the access fee. Not everyone even wanted a telephone. In the case of the drugstore, the phone was a loss-leader; it drew people to the store and hopefully they bought something after they used (or while waiting to use) the phone.

Private citizens were less than enthusiastic about telephones--they also didn't use the telegraph. Simply put, access was too expensive and almost no one knew anybody far enough away to justify the charge.

Perhaps it was our Jacksonian heritage; in any event, in the early 20th century a great hue and cry was raised over whether all people should have guaranteed access to telephones. And the decision was yes, they should. High rates and limited coverage were seen as overly discriminatory--despite the fact that telephone companies did not mind providing limited service. They were at a loss as to how they would make a profit through universal service. Sunk costs and maintenance ate up too much money--exactly the situation faced by railroads in the 19th century. Railroads made the most money on short, regular trips. In response to demand for access by farmers, however, the rails were extended (overextended) into most minor municipalities and across long distances. These costs were never recouped.

The telegraph companies' saving grace was that they were able to convince the railroads to let them string wires alongside tracks (which isn't hard to do if you are Jay Gould and you own both Western Union and the Union Pacific simultaneously). This development meant that if wires needed maintenance, the telegraph companies could just send out a rail car instead of horse-and-buggy.

Telephone companies in urban areas attempted to keep costs down in similar ways: often they tried to combine their installation of wires with other projects--this is why Chicago has a few miles of very cute little mini-railroad tunnels under the Loop. The tunnels carried away coal ash from the department stores and simultaneously provided ready-made space for sewage, telephone, and electrical wires. Predatory entrepreneurs with City Hall connections were quick to secure those franchises, too.

Anyway, back to net neutrality. The end of the telephone story is that phone companies implemented a differential pricing structure in response to the shift from exclusivity to inclusivity. To guarantee access to all potential customers, the companies made certain features optional and expensive. Moreover, if you wanted to use a public phone, you needed a nickel/dime/quarter.

Now, the internet is something I know very little about. I don't know what sort of infrastructure it requires, nor do I know who provides it (telecom companies?).

But I do know that the suggestion that major corporations ought to be able to procure high-speed access for their visitors, as well as short download times and better display features, for a higher price, seems just fine.

Yes, I do in fact think that big business should be able to charge more for access to the internet along a tiered pricing structure reminiscent of old telephone rates. I also think that small concerns should get less bandwidth and lower resolution sites. Download times will be longer? OK, though such an argument seems counter-intuitive (ESPN.com, because of its innumerable bells and whistles, loads far slower than stripped-down sites like Google.com).

Old-time telephone rates were predicated on the idea that people know what they need. If you don't make long-distance calls, then you don't need to pay for long-distance service. Today, that service is provided "free" with most home phone plans. Yet, I can choose which cable TV channels I want to watch and pay less as a result. This isn't a question of fair-vs.-unfair, or of cutting off knowledge for the masses (I challenge anyone to show that the internet teaches anybody anything useful); the left's opposition to making the internet more corporate stands upon a silly notion that it "should" be "free" to "all."

Congress is full of old people who think the internet is a set of tubes with trucks driving through them, so it's not surprising that Congress has no idea what to do about this issue. Larger telephone, internet, and cable companies want to institute differential pricing and limit the resources available to small web concerns, and that gets everybody's dander up because we think this is an infringement of free trade, free thought, etc. We like to be simple, Andy Jackson-type folks.

Well, that's not a great idea as far as I can see. I, personally, don't want unlimited internet access. The internet is, by and large, a huge time-waster. The virtual landscape is nearly devoid of content. Why would we demand unlimited access to something that wastes our time? I demand unlimited, unfettered access to LSD and Pink Floyd laser light shows! I demand unlimited access to soccer! I demand unlimited access to trivial information I'm not even creative enough to think of on my own and instead require a machine to retrieve for me if I can give it basic commands which often enough I cannot because my brain is quite stunted by American existence!

All attempted humor aside, I would be happy to choose how much access I have, and pay for only that. There is no possible length of download or poor screen resolution, or number of annoying pop-up ads, that could make me go to People Magazine Online. Or Fox News Online. Or CNN Online.

If major media outlets think that knee-capping the little sites will help them, they are mistaken. Old media is irrevocably in decline because of what it is, not what it downloads as. I'll take the internet subscription package where I never have to see any TV personalities--much less sex offenders like Bill O'Reilly--ever again, please. And, I'll gladly pay full price for it and wait a few more seconds for the pages I want to appear.

What else am I missing?

KC Messterpiece

There is an article in the NY Times called "Is it a Woman Thing, or is it Katie Couric?" and it's all about how the ratings for CBS' evening news have stayed very low since she took over the anchor's desk. Apparently, CBS has always been in third place among network news shows, but Couric is even lower in the ratings than her predecessors (including scary monkey-human robot prototype, Dan Rather). (If you want to read the piece, it's here, but you have to have the free registration account. Fag elitists!)

Well, is it that viewers don't like women as news anchors? Or, do people just dislike Katie Couric, who has been to the plastic surgeon's office just a couple-ten too many times and now appears as though her facial bones are eating their way out through her skin? She is the white Michael Jackson. Or, perhaps, she is the black Michael Jackson. I am confused.

And, I digress. I'm sure the answer to the Times' silly question (which was rhetorical, I believe) is: it's both.

Surely, the majority of viewers for the evening news is male. Older male. If you can't get old men to watch Dan Rather and his crewcut, then what is the draw with Katie Couric? She is haggish, shrill, unceasingly upbeat. And, she has a vagina--we think--which puts her beyond the comprehension of a large, albeit rapidly dying, segment of the American population. Unfortunately, misogyny is virulent, and middle America is chock-full of woman-hating assholes who learned it from their dads (and, if they are Republicans, their moms).

But then, Katie Couric herself is so objectionable, or ought to be, to all Americans regardless of geography or upbringing. Most, I would argue, don't like Katie and her goddamn bubbles of personality, like farts smelling of pancake batter, emitting from her thrice-rebuilt, red grease-smeared maw. The evening news is depressing, or so I've heard, and Ms. Couric reads it and talks about it as though a big fat black man is going to bust in any second and make us all chuckle with his banal weather jokes.

Couric's contribution to my consciousness is and always will be her "super-duper extra special report: TEENS HAVING SEX ALL THE TIME AND YOU CAN'T STOP THEM...except I, Katie Couric, will tell you how to stop them." She then proceeded to interview her daughter and her daughter's friends for a while, then interviewed herself in a mirror, and then had other people talk about her and her fabulous parenting skills--it was all very home movies. I recall thinking, "Katie Couric has spawned??" and then going online to purchase Apocalypse life insurance.

The special (and it was truly "special" in a short bus kind of way) basically amounted to: Katie Couric just recently found out that teenagers have genitals. And, she can't remember who told her this, teenagers like to touch their genitals, and have other people touch them, too. And Katie is such a cool mom that, you know, she's cool with that. And she wants her teenage daughter to know--and she wants YOU to know--that she's totally, like, cool with that. Cool? Cool. She's cool.

That was back when she was being groomed for the move into "serious" news. And, it obviously worked. In fact, she got so good at being "serious" that just a few months ago she attacked a cancer victim and her husband for an hour and accused them of making money and gaining fame by having the wife contract bone cancer.

But that's all gamma rays under the skin. The question now is, "what's wrong with CBS?" The answer that makes most sense is that Couric, like coffee, is best before 10 AM. Nobody wants to have a big, happy-because-it-gets-you-high cup of Katie at 6 PM after a long, shitty day at work. News is depressing, so should you be. Everybody feels mean at 6 PM; American media deliberately stokes the fires of intolerance and small-minded hatred just before and during prime time. That goes some way towards explaining the fact that every prime time show is a mean-spirited comedy or else is about gruesome murder. In the morning, however, the brain barely functions, everybody gets high on coffee, and there exists an optimism predicated upon the slim possibility that your place of work might be closed today for some reason. And in that delusional, stupidly happy little world, Katie Couric is the minstrel queen.

The solution is clear: stop watching TV.

Counterfactual

Considering the world economic picture in the second half of the 20th century and the first years of the current century, what would it have looked like if Japan had been granted limited surrender to end WWII?

That is, had the imperial and militarist systems been allowed to survive--along with the status quo ante bellum--surely Japan would have been drastically different from the ground-up reconstruction in our image that followed the war.

Unconditional surrender, then, was our fondest wish but has been our 50-year nightmare.

Technology Cap

Hat allows disabled people to play video games.

Really old, simple games, yes; but still: that deaf, dumb, and blind kid can now play a mean (virtual) pinball. I bet anyone who can operate a mouth-pen-driven wheelchair can kick ass at MarioCart.

You might say the inventor really had his thinking cap on. Or, that this is the capstone to his career. Or that there is no keeping the "lid" on this invention. If the cap fits, play with it! I "hat" to break it to you, but this one is "brimming" with potential!

And so forth.

He's Going Places

...like "divorce court." Judging by this ad, he likely hangs out there, anyway.

Say It Loud: They're Black and They're Tools

The contributors to this website think that it's just terrible how people rioted in France following the recent presidential election. Apparently, having a far-right xenophobe leading one of the most powerful nations in the world is A-OK with black Republicans. What's got their thongs-tha-thongs-thongs-thongs in a twist, though, is that people actually went outside and made their displeasure manifest.

The author even tries to draw a parallel to the 2000 US election when, he asserts in total ignorance of facts, Democrats wanted to make street fighting a form of political expression! You would be correct if you noticed that this person thinks the French left and the American Democratic Party are the same thing. Worse, he thinks that Sarkozy's "pro-American" description means he's just like a Republican! Well, Macaca, Jr., why don't you try to emigrate to France and see how cuddly Nicholas Sarkozy is? I'll bet that this person is a college graduate...

Further down on the site is a snippet from some black Brit who is running as a Conservative in England. Why is he on a website that's run by American black Republicans? Because these black Republicans think the British Conservative Party is exactly the same as their own party! Are they drunk, or just stupid?

Shaun Bailey, an aspiring MP from Hammersmith, is a religious conservative and a zero-tolerance, anti-drug candidate. That checks out with American conservatives, who either have their heads in fucking la-la land about these things or else secretly indulge in all manner of twisted shit while publicly forbidding it. I wonder if Bailey also has gay sex while high on meth?

Here's what Bailey has to say:

On drugs: "I know one guy who's only 17 years old and is a very successful crack dealer."It's not so much the money, Shaun," he told me, "it's the fact that I've got people who work for me."For rock he was able to get people to wash his car, clean his house, beat people up, steal stuff for him, send them on missions just because it made him feel powerful.Crime starts younger, spreads wider and goes further. The number of kids growing out of crime is getting smaller. It's why we get this horrible stuff with guns and knives: the serious nature of their offences is growing as the percentage of kids staying in crime rises."

Now, that sounds pretty simple. Shaun Bailey is anti-guns. He didn't whack his crack-dealing friend with a Bible, nor did he turn him in. Nor, because it bears repeating, did he get high with him and blow him, like some American conservatives we could name. He is trying to understand why people buy and sell drugs, which is pretty fucking basic, but it's far beyond anything that cuntbag Nancy Reagan or her addled husband ever thought of.

What else is on your mind, Shaun?

"The estates themselves are part of the problem. The blocks were badly designed. We are all too close to each other. On top of each other. One of the estates was built for 1,100 people but now houses 1,450.There are a lot of Moroccans, a lot of blacks. Everybody there is poor.Overcrowding has an impact on how young people behave.Most of the flats are built in such a way that nobody can sit around a table.Traditionally a table is where a family has discussions, where parents give attitudes to their children. If children come home and their parents are cooking them food, it establishes their dependency. It gives the parents authority. They can say: "You need to come in for dinner." They can set rules and boundaries.That doesn't happen here. There is no room for a table. We all eat dinner off our laps. Families start to not eat together because there is no point. We don't have any space at any time. That's why some parents can't love their children. They are too busy surviving."

Hmm. I'm confused. It sounds like this bloke thinks people need better housing in order to realize their human potential. Dude, haven't you heard? Your American Republican blood-brothers should have told you: poor people live in shitty houses because they're poor. I mean, if they wanted to be happy, they'd be rich, right?

"If you talk to those families where children are behaving the worst, you find that the kids have no rules and no boundaries. The reason is that the parents have never had any point at which to put them in place.Many of the young people I deal with have never spent any meaningful time with their mothers or their fathers. Their parents didn't do anything with them and they have no set of family rules that govern them.If you are the younger end of an overcrowded family you share a bedroom with your older brother. Maybe there are three of you in one small bedroom. You have no privacy so you come out of your flat for privacy. You stay on the block because you are comfortable there. It becomes your extended bedroom."

Oh, Jesus. Next, you'll be blaming WHITE PEOPLE for the fact that young blacks are assumed to be criminals!

"As time has gone on, the people who hang around the block have aged from cute little five-year-olds to 15, 16, 17, 18-year-olds. In some cases 21-year-olds are still hanging around.On one of the estates here there are 1,600 young people and kids under the age of 19. The sight of a big group of young people just terrorises most people. This is where it starts. The kids are perceived as a threat. They are dealt with in that manner. Then they take on the role they were handed. Put that with difficult parenting and you've got a problem."

Well, dammit Shaun! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps man! I mean, look at whites: they made it out of the ghetto!

"This was an area where poor white people were sent who couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The estates have also become home to London's largest Moroccan enclave and to Jamaican, Portuguese and Spanish communities. But, although we have been housed in our racial groups, racial tension is not a feature of life here."

Um, wait. Are you saying you like it there? And that residents, with a little help (read: common human decency) could make it a nice place to live, and that not everybody wants to be a millionaire and live in America and go ficky-ficky all day long?

He's a madman! Run for your Republican life!

Unless, that is, Shaun's going to be sensible. Minorities and poor people are really the ones responsible for their own misery, right Shaun? RIGHT, Shaun??

"The kids here also feel they have to have money. When you are poor, you see people on telly with phones, cars, iPods. To you the gang is the best way of getting this stuff because they steal, they rob.The great majority of them who are "going out there" -that means going out to rob, to make money -are just 14 or 15. They use terms such as "running up in your house" (aggravated burglary). They talk about needing Pounds 100-Pounds 400 a week. If you have that kind of money, you have respect and you can buy all the cool stuff and you can show them you've got it.

"If you stand around with these boys, it's not long before someone pulls out a wedge of money. They won't say anything; it is just to look cool.

"Young people here watch a lot of television, particularly MTV. It shows them cars and cribs (houses) and girls. They want it all. They don't learn about real economics, (so) Mustaf Jama, right, and Muzzaker Shah were being hunted by police last night for questionning over the murder of WPC Sharon Beshenivsky. (Jama, originally from Somalia, lived in the area of west London where Shaun Bailey grew up.) That's why you see them performing some really ugly crimes now, because that is the only way they can finance this lifestyle."

Oh. Oh dear. Apparently, "British Conservative" means "Godless Communist Who Hates America"!

Bedtime Reading

They could free these guys and offer an apology. If only they hadn't killed them.

Look: It's Football, OK?

The question being, "what is the only sport anybody watches on TV anymore?"

Hockey, Baseball, and, according to me, boxing, are all in the can. People watch football because it don't strain the ol' beaner and has lots of pointless aggression. NASCAR isn't a sport--it's hypnosis and muzak rolled into one--so that doesn't count.

But the NBA, now there's a pursuit swirling the drain among big lumps of poo. Michael Jordan retired and damn near killed that shit; and the leeway he was given by officials during his career killed the concept of "rules" in the sport. If one dunk was magical, then 50 dunks in a game would be...super-orgasmic-jizz-tastic-fantasmagorical! Or something.

Well, the NBA is unmitigated garbage. The games are over before they start, all the teams are exactly the same, none of the players can dribble, shoot, or play defense dependably, and the result is that only people with extremely low standards for "entertainment" (read: young males and celebrities) can stand the shit. This year's All-Star Game was decided by a score of 153-132, for Christ's sakes, and it drew the lowest rating EVER for the event (4.3). The year before had been the lowest ever (4.3), with the year before that being the lowest to that point, and the year before that being the lowest...and you get the point. In Jordan's last season with the Bulls, 1998, it was a 10.6, and that was the last time the game drew more than an 8.2. That is a steeeeep decline.

I would like to think that Kobe Bryant, the biggest name in the game, being an admitted adulterer and assumed rapist (he paid off his accuser to get the case dismissed), would hurt the league with viewers. But, as this article points out, the Lakers are in fact the only team keeping the NBA on television!

What is happening to sports in this country when one whole game becomes the purview of advertisers, misogynistic young men, and super-egos? And when do declining revenues drive the stake through basketball's heart?

God Defeats Man

or, perhaps, man claiming to speak to God defeats man. Or something.

Ugh. This guy scrubbed off the Aristotelian commentary--along with the only known work of Hyperides and an original work by Archimedes--so he could write down rote mumblings to his favorite imaginary overlord. Smooth move, shithead.

Not Biographical Enough

Though the title, "Toby Keith: Working Class Hero, or Rich Asshole?" is one I can certainly get behind.

Some years ago a nice working man who was gluing laminate to a wall asked out loud, "why is all country music today so gay? It's all about how much 'I miss my daddy,' and 'I love my wife and kids and my truck and my big house on the cul-de-sac.' What the fuck is that?"

It was a good question then, and it's a good one now. Men don't usually sing about how their dads were better than them (in fact, isn't that the opposite of the American Dream? Aren't we supposed to achieve greatness our parents couldn't?). And country singers sure as shit shouldn't be talking about upper middle class bliss and how it suits them.

Dockers Khakis = Death.

Cowboy Hat = Brain Parasite

Ford F-150 "Rancher Edition" = Endless Shame

...courtesy of the (F-)USA

The Slow Death of Boxing

Ah, boxing: the only athletic pursuit that draws less interest in America than hockey.

Last night, Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather squared off in a light middleweight (154 lbs) title fight that was supposed to single-handedly revive the sport. Mayweather came in having advanced over 5 weight classes in his career and sporting a 37-0 record. De La Hoya, clearly just past his prime and age 34, came in with 4 losses but holding the belt (the sixth weight class title he's had).

De La Hoya, and his promotional company, are out to "save" boxing by taking fights out of the hands of promoters like Don King and Bob Arum, the crooks who have systematically robbed fighters and fans alike over the past 3 decades. The current state of the sport is dire: fighters make very little money and have very short careers. Promoters rake in as much as possible and arrange fights few fans want to see but will still pay for--because it's the only way they'll get to see any boxing at all. Most champions are acknowledged to be shams: the sanctioning bodies all disagree on who the top contenders are, who the champions are, and even what the weight classes are!

So De La Hoya, a boxer, wants to change some of that. He wants to create a stable of top boxers who will arrange their own fights, with other elite fighters, and retain most of the money from those bouts. It seems like a good idea.

Fighting Mayweather, who is considered the pound-for-pound best pugilist in the world at this minute (a silly designation, really, but useful in certain circumstances), was going to be giving the people what they wanted. It was supposed to be a Leonard-Hagler matchup--brawling, puches-in-bunches excitement. This one event would bring in a whole new set of fans, once people saw what boxing could be when it was done right, and for the right reasons.

Well, that fight motherfucking sucked.

Mayweather, who was a very light 150 pounds, having actually lost 4 pounds since the weigh-in, stayed outside all night and jabbed away. He got caught on the ropes a few times but then slipped out, refusing to brawl with De La Hoya. To me, he looked awkward on defense, nowhere near the escape-artist he was supposed to be. He had zero power at that weight, too, and he was unable to mark De La Hoya, let alone knock him out as he had promised pre-fight. In short, Floyd Mayweather is a joke against someone who can actually box (Mayweather, to put it politely, has never fought anyone worth naming).

De La Hoya, older and heavier, tried for the first 6 rounds to get Mayweather to throw with him. He backed him into the corner, he threw combinations, he tried to land power punches. Mayweather just kept backing up. It was exactly as exciting, interesting, and re-invigorating for the sports fan as watching a pitcher intentionally walk somebody; or watching a team down by 20 intentionally foul for the final 3 minutes of a basketball game; or a football team calling timeout to "ice" the kicker on a 30-yard field goal try.

Except, of course, in this case the guy playing spoiler was ahead on the cards. Mayweather threw a lot more punches and landed several--though far fewer, in my opinion, than he was credited with, as De La Hoya caught most of them with his gloves--though no power punches or body shots. He danced away, always away, and jabbed efficiently for 12 rounds. Efficient jabs, though nice, are not going to inflame the masses.

So that is it, then: boxing's best matchup, the one no crooked promoter would make, the fight "the people demanded" to see, was a flop. One fighter was there to entertain and incite; the other was there to get the win (his last, as Mayweather announced his retirement afterwards) and to look pretty doing so. The politics of the moment escaped him.

And in the end, just to add insult to injury, it was a split decision. Discounting the "aggressor" theory (that is, many judges will score a bout for the more aggressive fighter, whether he's actually being successful in landing his punches and as though good defensive fighters don't belong in the sport), I had the fight 115-113 for Mayweather. He simply didn't get hit--because he didn't box--but he managed to land just enough jabs to win rounds. But one judge actually scored the fight 115-113 for De La Hoya, with the other two going for the winner.

This, I believe, was the kiss of death from organized boxing to Oscar De La Hoya. De La Hoya wanted a clean fight, one that was above suspicion, and so one of the judges threw the decision precisely to remind all the fans--who were already steamed over the poor fight--that boxing is crooked, and it always will be, and nobody is going to make it otherwise.

Oh, Bra-vo.

Scientists think Mercury (the planet) might have a molten core.

Nice work, (literal) Einstein. You mean to say that the planet that's an inch from the sun is all melty inside? Wow. Keep that tax money flowing into the research budget!

Seriously, so you "discovered" that the little rock has a liquid core, which means it has a magnetic field, which is of what use to us, exactly? I've "discovered" that gasoline works faster than lighter fluid to get the grill started. Neither "discovery" is useful to humans.

Did we already establish that Mercury is, like, an inch from the motherfucking sun?