Are my eyes really blue?

Plugging away at home and at work. I seem to be on a productive streak lately in both cases - not only am I churning through a lot of paperwork at the office (which deadline is approaching like a freight train) but I have also scheduled an eye exam, a CSDC appointment, come up with an anniversary plan (of sorts), replaced the filter in the icemaker and finally ploughed through the enormous backlog of dirty laundry and dirtier dishes.

Coming up on the to-do list: schedule my first 10.5 certification test, see about changing to a credit card with a lot of travel benefits, switch all my automatic monthly payments over to said card, and finally, dig through my wardrobe and see what I really need to start looking like a respectable human being on a regular basis. See, my last job entailed a good bit of manual labor, and by "a good bit" I mean "I had my knee scoped and am still going to the chiropractor regularly." As a consequence, my normal apparel ran to increasingly-roughed-up jeans, an endless stream of company T-shirts, and of course nice stylish black steel toed boots that would make me look like Frankenstein even if I hadn't got size 13 feet.

Now, I know what system administrators are expected to look like. However, I like to think that I and my crew are a cut above the typical knuckle-dragging troglodytes that normally reside in the basement tending the machines. Hell, we once turned out in suits for happy hour to try to impress a pack of girls in the next department over. Much good it did us, but still, we cleaned up real good, and the PC hardware guys went to great lengths to look sharp on a regular basis (much to our frequent chagrin). Anybody who saw the spectacle of Del Boca Vista Social Club should know that we rolled in style.

So I want to look a little nicer than the typical Sleestak you see in the server room. Problem is, a lot of my wardrobe is black. And fading from overuse. A string of coincidences meant that I went out for a walk last night in head-to-toe black - jacket, sweater, jeans, boots - and every piece was a different shade of black. Not too money!

Oddly enough, I found myself mixing a lot of brown and gray in the last year or two. I thought maybe I was really botching it. However, on Timbuk2's website, pretty much every new bag for 2008 is in some combination of brown and gray, so who knows, maybe I'm ahead of things. I still walk around wondering whether I'm on safe ground with a black jacket and brown shoes, or vice versa, but I made sure to buy a reversible belt so I'm covered there.

Maybe I should stop with all the black, but look here, my main influences were St. Johnny Cash, St. Roy Orbison, and Darth Vader, so what do you want from me?

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Grey’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

They need to teach you this on Day One in tech support class.

EDIT: And now, the epitome of Gen-X Zen:

"If Ponch and Jon had to arrest Bo and Luke, who would win?"

1) Anybody using WordPress and hosting it yourself, rather than using wordpress.com?

2) How difficult is it to install the WP infrastructure on a system that's already rigged for Movable Type 3? Can you use the existing install of MySQL or is there more stuff to set up on the server?

I do not have the chops to redesign this thing myself, and the stuff I can get to with StyleCatcher resolutely fails to blow my skirt up. However, I have not found anything in iWeb or Sandbox to be suitable for blogging, and it really seems that everyone who's anyone is using WordPress. But if it's not going to be simple and instantly rewarding, I don't want to put my brother-in-law through the whole reconfiguration and install process.

So...y'all holler ;]

...let this be true about Apple and Wal-Mart.

Lately it seems like I'm gauging Apple's success not by how good the product it, not by any imagined edge in "elegance", not by the impressive resistance to malware, but solely on market share and stock value. Does that make me some kind of raging narcocapitalist?

EDIT: YEAH, SON. Take that you Arkie swine!!!!

If you've never actually read the test of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, knock off for about 20 minutes and click the link. It seems like all we get 45 years on are sound bites and quick clips - you need to read the full text to realize that this wasn't just some random "black leader," this was somebody with three degrees and an unimpeachable background in sociology, theology, and Western philosophy, whose argument knit together everything from the Fiery Furnace to the uprising in Hungary and who quoted everybody from Reinhold Niebuhr to T.S. Eliot.

This guy was good.

More later, on why 40 years isn't as long as it feels like.

Of the teams in the Final Four, 3 of them are among THE flagship programs of college basketball. Any list of the greatest programs has to include UCLA, North Carolina and Kansas. (I would also throw Kentucky, Duke, and Indiana in there - I think that's your top 6 hands-down.) I find it singular that every one of them but Indiana has blue as their primary color.

And all four of the teams this time are blue-based. Hm.

I'm pulling for Memphis, as they are the closest thing to an underdog here. They were everyone's pick for the 1-seed that wouldn't make it, and instead they have caught fire in a big way. The Conference USA and state of TN connections also help - love for ConfUSA going back to its roots as the Great Midwest and UAB's last turn as a big-time program. In fact, a Memphis-Kansas final would suit me right down to the ground.

Yeah, this is a strong Final Four. I just wish they would catapult Nantz and Packer into a swamp and give us Gus Johnson on play-by-play. Seriously, he's this generation's Dick Vitale - just electrifying without having become self-parody yet.

There will be more about blue later.

Rock, chalk, oh I'm sorry is that a foot in your nuts? This is like watching the first half of Vanderbilt-Kentucky II again. Roy Williams looks like a man who just got force-fed an entire box of Frosted Mini Ass Whoopins.

This isn't a game, it's an autopsy.

Meanwhile, I was going to mention blue. I bought a pair of sunglasses today with blue lenses. OK, they're blue-coated, they don't actually make everything look blue. But I ran over my last pair of blue-lensed shades. No, really. We borrowed the van from my in-laws when we were collecting boxes to move into the house, it were dark, there were a crunch, BITTER!

For the last two years, basically my only sunglasses have been a pair of tortoise Ray-Ban Wayfarers. They are a classic timeless look, and I love the polarized amber lens because of the way it enhances contrast and just makes things pop. But they do have that big plastic look, which doesn't always go with everything, and they will not sit on top of my head without falling off. So I wanted something metal-framed, lightweight, with blue lenses. Why blue? Because I think my eyes are my one reliably attractive feature, and I want to keep the same color where my eyes should be even when I have shades on.

I told you it was irrational. Anyway, now I have blue lenses in a half-rimmed metal frame with spring hinges and which will sit on my head without constantly feeling like it's going to come flying off. I can only justify this because I have leftover birthday money that has been burning a hole in my bank account for a month.

Well, Carolina seems to be waking up. Never let your foot off the throttle. You can go to jail for point-shaving.

HRC has fired her chief strategist and pollster, Mark Penn. This is this guy who thought the best place to be on Potomac Tuesday eve was doing a book reading in New York City. He may not be TSFGOTFOTE, but he's on the podium.

The question is, has he been sacked too late? Had he been catapulted into a swamp after the Super Tuesday split, somebody with a little more sense might have put together an actual plan to close the deal down the stretch. Instead, Team HRC lost eleven straight contests and gave away the perception of inevitability - and then the perception of being the lead horse. Once people accept you're in second place, you can't get back to first just by saying you are over and over.

Meanwhile, I can't believe that the clowns I saw stacked fifty-deep in Punxsutawney are going to be decisive in determining who the Democratic candidate is. Somewhere on that great sideline in the sky, Coach Radi is laughing his ass off.

Contains sardonic political vitriol. Shielded for the sake of the childs; follow the jump or the link.

They've repurposed "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" to sell pre-paid cellphones on butt-trifling at&t.

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

The tabloid headline tomorrow will be "TIGER GAG", as Memphis had Kansas dead to rights - and then inexplicably froze. The free throw became their Kryptonite again, and then Mario Chalmers basically guaranteed that he will forever be known as "Super Mario" and never pay for another drink in the Sunflower State for the rest of his life...and then they held the line the whole way in OT.

Nothing but pressure when you're coaching a program founded by the man who, you know, INVENTED basketball. But Bill Self - another on that long line of former Tulsa Golden Hurricane coaches made good - basically took the monkey off his back, dragged it out behind the outhouse and gave it the beatdown this weekend. They didn't back into it, they didn't fluke into it - they came back and took it, decisively. And we got a hell of a game for our trouble.

Maybe not the best tournament year ever, but don't try telling them that in Lawrence. =)

I have now updated to Flock 1.1.1, which is WICKED fast.  It also imported my OPML file without a fight, it logged right into Twitter and Facebook - I kind of dig it.  Although to be honest, I'm not sure I see the virtue in having everything in one app a la the old days of Netscape Communicator.  Normally, what I am doing in Flock would be covered by...

• OmniWeb (or Camino or Safari)
• NewsFire (free and $ILLY for RSS reading)
• Twitteriffic
• An extra window just for Facebook - well, I wouldn't do that, so it keeps Facebook up
• ecto, for blogging

Also, plenty cised that things have been quiet enough to let me catch up on the Junks today.  What a bunch of morons.  I love them so.

I tell the wife after 8 innings "I'll come up to bed after the game."

Top of the 9th, the Giants give up the tying run. Fortunately, Benji Molina hits a sayonara shot...in the bottom of the 11th.

Any win you can walk away from...

(Did you see those donkeys scaling the GOLDEN F-ING GATE BRIDGE?? Anybody else suddenly feel a hell of a lot less safe around here? If three protestors can CLIMB UP THE FATHER-MUCKING BRIDGE and nobody notices, I respectfully suggest that the Department of Homeland Security doesn't give a shit about California. Also, where do I go to buy stock in "Something will go pear-shaped during the Olympic Torch run tomorrow"?)

So I had a little loose money in my pocket and couldn't decide what to do with it. As it turns out, it seemed like a new Blootoof was a good idea (new law kicks in this summer; hands-free only in the Golden State) and so were my ridiculous new blue shades.

Naturally, as soon as I have spent my walking-around money, I start thinking of things I wish I could run right out and buy, to wit, e.g.; viz:

* Seersucker jacket (stop laughing! STOP IT!)
* New Timbuk2 Coder bag
* New water bottle (because the FIRST FIVE aren't cutting it?)
* New big Timbuk2 backpack suitable for carry-on and taking abroad
* New duct-tape-wrapped Moleskine Cahier and 0.38mm G2 pens

I think a lot of the problem is exacerbated by the big feature piece in this week's Economist, all about mobile technology. They go on a bit about the transformative power of the mobile phone (see my post from December about the MOTOFONE F3) and discuss the growth of digital nomadism, warning about the danger zone in which "you can work anywhere" tips into the realm of "you must work everywhere." And the thing is...I want to be a digital nomad. I want to be able to work from the coffee shop, from the back deck of the pub, from the cigar shop, to do everything off a MacBook and a cell phone. I want, as McClellan Pope did, to have my headquarters where my hindquarters should be. (Look it up, Yankee. I had to.) In short, I want to *need* the stuff that I merely *want*.

The whole suite of articles also made an interesting argument that I hadn't seen before. We all know that the Internet has a way of making things more self-referential, making it possible to get your news and see your friends and only ever see the stuff you really want to see (which is one reason I've tried to make an effort to broaden my political readings the last couple of months). However, the writer makes the case that unlimited technology tends to strengthen the strong social ties (you can be in touch with your friends constantly, even across a continent or two) at the expense of the weak ties (your Twittering from the cafe in the Rue Cler comes at the expense of striking up a conversation with the couple at the next table who have the County Wexford GAA shirts on). Consequently (inventing my own term here), what we're seeing is not the atomization of society, but the molecularization of society. Tiny clumps of our own kind, at best loosely associated and at worst completely unbonded to larger things.

I don't know about all this. What I do know is that the five years prior to my first Net access were an unmitigated disaster, and that pretty much anything good that has happened in my life since has ultimately derived from being online. So is that the tradeoff? Are we giving up large-scale structure in order to make sure that the few rogue atoms find somewhere to bond? And ultimately, are we more worried about the health of the compound or the health of the atoms?

I have had it. HAD IT. Spare me any more talk about elitists or small towns or anything remotely close to it. Nobody - NOBODY - not ONE SINGLE F-ING MEMBER of the United States Senate has ANY standing to talk as if they're some salt-of-the-earth defender of the sainted sons of the soil, manning the barricades against the horrible awful big-city slick-talking wheeler-dealers who are out to sucker the hayseeds.

John Rogers said it better than I ever will so go read it there. Meanwhile, I will nick one quote:

"I am just, I guess, well and truly tired of being told what "Middle America" wants, when Middle America is my age and lives in a goddam city, just like I have for my entire life."

Arlington, Virginia, is America. Manhattan? America. Los Angeles? San Francisco? Silicon Valley? AMERICA, and don't you !-ing forget it. Anybody who seriously wants to spend 2008 selling the old "real America" trope needs to cut that shit out with a quickness, because I. Will. Cut. Your. Ass. I mean it.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1063a2BushDefeatsTruman.pdf

The PDF linked above details that the approval rating for George W. Bush has not broken 50%...since January 16, 2005.

Now, for our international readers, those under age 14, or those just too stupid to remember Civics class, the President is sworn in on January 20 following the previous November's election.

Bush the Younger has managed to spend literally his entire second term under the Seinfeld line. He would probably sell his soul to Ted Kennedy for a shot at "even steven" at this point. Theoretically this shouldn't even be possible, unless something massively awful happened between November and January, and unless the royal screwing Cal football took from the BCS reflected on the ratings of a Texan President, I can't think of any reason for the bottom to start falling out then.

And yet he still won. Why is that? The Rove offense, kids, and believe me when I say it's entirely possible to be under 50% nationally and still win safely. As long as you can't cut through the mud, you will fail to activate lightly-interested undecideds and you will lose to a better-organized and better-motivated base.

Obama's going to school in a big way in Pennsylvania. He has the "beleaguered" tag hung around his neck like Apple Computer in 1996. He has a ruthless and implacable foe between him and the general, when he would be going up against the living, breathing proof that the "liberal media" is a myth. Either he brings his alpha game for the final 7 days...or the 2008 Democratic nomination for President becomes the 1986 Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama: one long, murderous, soul-destroying slog where the winner's trophy is full of poison at the end. And John McCain looks more and more like Guy Hunt every day.

We get it! The Sixties (tm) were unlike anything in history! The baby boomers were unlike anything that ever came before or since! Things like a half-assed leftist insurrectionist wannabe from THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO are far, far, FAR more important than the fact that we're paying $4 a gallon for gas, everyone's mortgage is upside down and oh yeah, WE STILL HAVEN'T BAGGED OSAMA BIN LADEN.

I really don't want this blog to be all politics all the time, but I swear, I will stop beating this dead horse AS SOON AS THE PRESS STOPS SCREWING IT!

Fifteen years ago, I remember watching the early days of the Clinton era, when George Stephanopoulos was still handling the daily presser. And I remember sitting there in the den with the old man, knocking down my Crystal Pepsi, and watching this little sawed-off joker answering questions. My dad eyed him dubiously and said something I've never forgotten:

"That one looks like they ought to be sending his ass to get the keg."

As with most things, he was right - I think he accurately assessed George's full range of competence and skill set. Nothing in the ensuing 15 years has given me any reason to deviate from that evaluation.

I don't know where I first heard the phrase "paralysis by analysis," but it comes up a lot in my mind. Today, it came up when looking at the five (5) polycarbonate* bottles in the dishwasher. My thought was this: I only have one coffee thermos, and as a result, it gets washed out on a more or less daily basis. With five water bottles, though, I use one, use another one, forget to wash, next thing I know I'm sitting on five bottles which have been sitting unlaundered for a week and starting to smell a little odd despite having had nothing but filtered tap water in them.

Similarly, I've got too many shoes, especially for a guy. It didn't help that my last company was buying me a new pair of steel-toed Docs every year, but over the course of the last six or seven years, I've accumulated a lot of shoes in the attempt to settle on the ideal pair of grown-up casual footwear - and now there are so many shoes that are not quite right that it only makes me look for the one pair that will be just right.

Even worse is my fixation on trying to find a team to support in the Premier League - I have arguments for Newcastle Utd, Aston Villa, Man City, even Chelsea - not to mention a passing interest in the likes of Spurs, Everton, or Fulham - but nothing that clinches the deal and makes it clear which is going to be the team I follow. (And if you look at how the list has grown in the last year and a half, when the original question was "Spurs or Magpies?", you can see what I mean.)

This is actually the reason why a lot of Apple products function the way they do, especially in the iPod range. They are functionally simplified in the name of clarity and ease of use. A lot of other stuff could be shoehorned in there, but one only has to look at the Zune to see what happens when you try to do too much too fast. And along those lines, I find myself moving more and more stuff into the guest closet, trying to pare down and get to just the stuff I need.

I think like much of my life, this is just a word problem writ large, and if I can solve it, not only will I get an A, but another piece of the puzzle will fall into place. By the way, Jimminy Christmas but Newcastle and Villa are filling up the net today...

*I'm not nearly as het up about the whole "OMG the bisphenol-A is coming to get us all" - it's been out there as a known potential issue for years, and those fainting panic-bunnies in the European Commission have said it's not enough to warrant taking them off the market. Plus I'm sure I got exposed to more endocrine-disrupting female hormones just being sat by the bachelorette-party-gone-wrong last night. Besides, the steel bottles will give you something when the chromium breaks down, and the aluminum bottles will give you Alzheimers or something else when the lining goes away, and the lining will poison you slowly, and the soft plastic bottles will make the water taste like petroleum and harbor bacteria, and the pre-packaged bottled water is less regulated than tap water and you can't reuse the bottles anyway, and...well, you know my solution, and it rhymes with Laker's Dark.

So I didn't exactly go to a normal high school. Officially, our mascot was the Tree. We were the Trees. SRSLY. But we didn't exactly have any sports teams or colors, so it didn't really work. Besides, the one competitive group I was part of was more frequently known by other names (e.g. Argonauts).

However, inside the student lounge (i.e. big open carpeted room with almost no furnishings that hadn't been cleaned in about two decades), painted on one of the cinderblock walls was a huge mural of the Thing breaking through the wall. Now, consider this:

1) The Thing is a wiseass.

2) The Thing has powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary man.

3) The Thing cannot disguise what he is and frequently inspires fear and loathing rather than heroic admiration.

4) The Thing is identified with his eye color, e.g "the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing!"

Seriously. Do the math, people.

Without further ado:

BEST CASE SCENARIO, TEAM OBAMA: the Al Davis. "Just win, baby." If Obama goes home with more votes in PA than Clinton, that's the ballgame. Winning the Keystone State outright would dry up the last plausible argument - that Obama can't win large swing states - and the superdelegates would start falling like dominoes. Not to mention the donors.

BEST CASE SCENARIO, TEAM CLINTON: Double-digit win. Anything over 10% is good, anything over 15% is very good, suggesting not only viability but maybe the beginnings of momentum, or at least the meme that Obama's hit the high-water mark and will only descend further. Given that Team Clinton started the month of April with a little over $9M in the bank and a little over $10M in debt, a decisive win is absolutely imperative to open the pocketbooks of people whose contributions she desperately needs down the stretch.

TEAM OBAMA IS HOPING: That HRC was too clever by half. The Rove offense relies on driving away loosely motivated voters, and at last check, the surveys are still showing about 6-8% undecided. If those people don't bother to post, and Philly comes through strong, Obama could close the deal right here.

TEAM CLINTON IS HOPING: That nobody will remember their lead was 20% the day of the Ohio and Texas primaries. Beating Obama by 4-6% may look like a win, but it will barely move the needle on delegate margins. If she actually manages to donk off three-fourths of the lead in six weeks, and the media latches onto the fact, it won't be good. At this point, it's not a straight fight; she's got to cover the point spread, and right now, we're not even sure what the spread ought to be.

WORST-CAST SCENARIO: A push against the Vegas line, so to speak. HRC wins by 6-8%, not enough to make a convincing case for her own momentum but enough to keep from sending her to live with a nice farm family - which means that, just like Rocky, we're headed to a bloody split decision...and two fighters being rushed directly to the hospital afterward.

Now, normally this is where I remark about how John McCain is sat on a pile of gold, watching this entire debacle unfold, laughing through his cigar smoke and drinking champagne out of a stripper's brassiere. However, it looks like McCain's going to have to accept public money for the general election campaign, which will cap him at $84M. Team Obama has already made it clear they're not going the public-money route, and given their success at adopting the Howard Dean model for aggregating small donations, they stand to have quite the financial advantage in the general if they get there. Obviously, assorted 527s and other independent-expenditure entities will affect that balance as well.

Did Chris Matthews actually just say that there's a great cleavage in society between African-Americans + white liberals and "regular people"?

I misheard that, right?

PLEASE tell me I misheard that.

Because if I didn't, that worthless piss-haired fuck needs to die in a fire. Preferably while being sodomized by a grizzly. With herpes.

I will have a LOT more to say about this shortly.

...I have bought half a dozen shirts. Pretty nice ones, too - three polo-type shirts and three button-ups (one wrinkle free and the other two of a material that you don't iron anyway). Now, for those of you who think I slipped a chromosome, let me explain.

Ten years ago, when I started out in high-tech in Washington DC, we were actually still shirt-and-tie four days a week. No lie, everyone in IS was wearing a shirt and tie and nice casual pants. I don't know what I was doing for shoes back then - it was before the coming of the Docs, so I can only assume I was hitting my old Rockports hard - but long story short, I didn't look anything like what you'd expect from our industry.

About a year in, we were spared the ties - the whole organization went away from any sort of dress code, by order of the CEO. Nevertheless, I stuck to reasonably decent collared shirts, kept jeans to a minimum, never wore tennis shoes. Five years on, I was wearing Hawaiian shirts, skipping socks altogether from Easter to Columbus Day, and by the time I left they were just lucky I was wearing pants.

Next job was basically in a warehouse. Steel-toed boots every day. Anything nicer than jeans and a formal T-shirt was asking for trouble, what with all the boxes to lift and skids to unpack and etc etc etc. After about a year and a half, though, I got moved into a position where I was driving a desk all day and could afford to dress a little nicer - but not too nice, because we still had to unload the truck every day. So I didn't bother upgrading from the same shirts I'd been wearing back in DC, and it showed - especially since I was getting another free T-shirt every other month and just wearing those.

Long story short (too late!): with the exception of a couple of date-night-type shirts, I haven't really done anything for the top half of my wardrobe in half a decade. Now I'm in a position with much MUCH less physical labor, and I can actually try to make an effort at looking decent. And for some reason, probably because I'm 36, I feel the need to start dressing like a grown-up.

So six new shirts (though at least one will probably get returned). NONE of them in black. Or gray. Only one that could reasonably be called dark. I guess this makes me some kind of adult?

On the last day of the season, Morton beat Partick Thistle 3-0. This ties them with rival Clyde on 37 points...and gives Morton a one-goal lead on the tiebreaker, goal differential.

And as a result, Morton are guaranteed to stay in the Scottish First Division, while Clyde go into a relegation playoff with the 2, 3, and 4 teams from the Second Division.

Any win you can walk away from...

UP THE TON!!

RENAULT: ...and what in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert!

RICK: I was misinformed.

That's how it begins. They tell you that everything's going to be so much better once you're out of school. Once you get to college. Once you get out of college. Once you get out of this stinking town and head for the big city. Once you get out of the rat race. Once you make partner, once you make VP, once you get the star on your shoulder. Everyone - and I mean everyone - perpetuates this lie that at some point, the game comes to an end, and you can sit back on your arse and relish the spoils of victory.

Hell, they convinced me. They convinced me half a dozen times. Everything will be fine once you get to junior high high school college grad school the real world California on staff ... Eventually you learn too late, as I did, that Hollywood's concept of high school and college is NOTHING like reality. Andie doesn't get Blaine. The laser doesn't fire. The popular girl doesn't get run over by a bus. The team loses the big game 65-0 and the struggling striver doesn't even get into a uniform, let alone on the bench. The nerds get crushed underfoot, if they get noticed at all, and the plain girl with a heart of gold always gets overlooked. Hell, the only true thing that ever happened in a teen movie was that the girl Duckie pined after went off with the popular rich kid instead - and then they queered the whole thing by throwing him a pneumatic blonde as a consolation prize. But I digress.

The point is this: Jonathan Coulton is right. The cake is a lie. No matter how many problems you solve, no matter how many pieces you fit together, no matter how close you think you are to picking the lock - the test never ends, the puzzle is never solved, and you will never escape. You just have to keep chugging along - you never get to see what's on the other side of the hill, because it just goes up and up and up. The hard part is learning how to cope with it. Which I am sure I will be doing, to an utterly annoying extent, in this very space.

So on that cheerful note...

"Tolerance, in sum, was pretty well extinguished all along the line, and conformity made a nearly universal law. Criticism, analysis, detachment, all those activities and attitudes so necessary to the healthy development of any civilization, every one of them took on the aspect of high and aggravated treason. Indeed, this is only half to state the fact, for the peculiar effect of the extraordinarily close identification of the individual with the idea of the South, and of the continually sharpening personal outlook, was this: that any questioning or doubting of the South in any respect (and in tis atmosphere of boiling emotion, merely to stand aloof a little was ipso facto to be convicted of such questioning and doubting) was inevitably felt by each loyal Southerner as a questioning and doubting of his immediate ego. Which is to say that, being what he was, he inevitably felt it as a challenge to be resisted with all the enormous pugnacity at his disposal..."

-W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 1941

Read this and realize that I got there 15 years ago. The older I get, the better I was, yeah yeah yeah...but I really was good at this once, and I nailed it.

* The Supreme Court rules that photo ID can be required in order to vote.

* Government-issued photo ID (other than employee badges for government employees) generally consists of a driver's license or passport.

* A driver's license is not free, nor is a passport; a fee is required to obtain same.

* Therefore, a fee is required to vote.

* Amendment 24, US Constitution: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote...shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax."

* Therefore, the Supreme Court has endorsed a patently unconstitutional decision.

* Therefore, the six Justices voting in the affirmative should rightly be impeached and removed from the bench.

* Q. E. mother-!ing D.

Mainstream sports journalism died last night.

Please join me and the rest of the blogosphere in taking an enormous Duce Staley on the corpse.

Bill Simmons once said that the reason he started blogging - which is basically what he was doing back in the days of the Boston Sports Guy, even if he didn't realize it at the time - was because he wanted to write about sports, and there were a limited number of slots in the field, held by cranky old guys who were never going to leave the position until six friends carried them out of it by the handles. So he struck out for the Internet in hopes of making something happen for himself. Some say he sold out. I prefer to think of him as our man on the inside.

That's why guys like Will Leitch, Orson Swindle, and their pale imitators are currently pwning the hell out of the sad-sacks who write the column in your local fishwrap. The bloggers are winning because bits are cheap, publication is just a matter of hanging out a URL, and - in the case of 95% of sports bloggers - they're not doing it for the kind of wealth that lets them sit on a mound of gold, drinking Cristal out of a stripper's brassiere. They're doing it because they really and truly care about the things they write about. They're not filled with the kind of self-loathing that makes columnists get all serious and one-word-paragraph pompous about "perspective" and "what really matters" everytime something awful happens in the real world. They know exactly what their place in the food chain is - somewhere between the Twinkie and the beef jerky - and unlike the print guys, they don't have to be any more than that. Spencer Hall knows what's important - the man's career is working with international refugees - so when he tallies the scores for the Fulmer Cup and loops together a funk theme for it in Garage Band, he knows how important it is in the grand scheme of things; he doesn't need some buffet-hoovering J-school washout telling him what truly matters.

We let absolutely anybody vote in this country. The fate of the United States hangs perennially in the hands of 100 million lightly-informed amateurs. The problem is, the print columnists think that what they do somehow demands a higher standard than that. Somehow, they've deluded themselves into thinking that they have to set a bar for what is, at the end of the day, the journalistic version of wanking.

Which is why it's appropriate that their dying yelp came from a man named after the sound a vibrator makes.