BFF

BFF has managed to lose his free domain name associated with his free blog management software. I have never heard of anyone having a whit of trouble with Blogger, but apparently he feels he has been exiled (and assures me that there is an army of Blogger-disenfranchised out there beyond my horizon).

Now, the President himself landed a black helicopter in my yard and promised me that this difficulty--which I say in all seriousness as an actual Web professional, no one in the entire human universe could possibly deliberately replicate--is because dogma-N (and yes, this kind of stuff is exactly how he got that name, lo these 30 or so years ago) likes Brad Manning and Ed Snowden. Then he fired a drone at my neighbor. So I guess it's real.

Anyway, he's here for now. I've whacked him from the rolls until he settles, because I'm not going to change it every other day while he gets it resolved, and because I'm not sending you to the fuckware site at which his domain name presently resides.

Update: BFF correctly corrects me in comments. He paid for the domain name. So like his theorizing, my mockery is misplaced. Fine metaphors, as someone says, abound.

This is not to say that Google should offer domain names through cheapass nobody low bidders. And trust me on this: I know from cheapass nobody low bidders. But it's not uncommon or unique to Google. I just had a similar, much lower-profile experience with another IT leviathan whose productivity software you are forced to use--a black hole between a big name and some schlubs to whom they outsourced a chunk of human interface, in this case their e-store.

Which cycles us back to this: trust no one. Which is a highly synthesized, overly simplified, and completely useless version of BFF's point.

Attention

Hey Packer-lover, it took me three weeks to realize you'd gone all underground. Please email me at the blog address, or leave a comment telling me you're still undead and I should fuck off. Peace and thanks.

United 1-2 KC: This Ain't Hard

Shatzer and others correctly tag the critical meme here: high pressure (and secondarily, inability to suss out a 4-3-3). DCU can't cope, and never has. Shatzer and others completely fuck up the impact of missing players; no, Korb and Chabala is not a dropoff from Russell and Woolard, except to the extent that Chabala had joined the team only three days before. Look, if you can't understand that the team has managed to tactically correct for Woolard's incredible slowness, and incredible fucking stupidity, to the point where you believe that Daniel Woolard is a credible starting left back for any team that doesn't have some bar's name blazoned across its shirts, I can't fucking help you.

I'm not convinced that the blame should lie entirely with Olsen, who has coached the team to shorter passing, single touches, good ball movement. There was none of that in evidence last night, and I'm hard-pressed to believe that Olsen came out before the game and told the team, "Hey, let's languidly drop long balls back into KC's laps, and stand around on defense, and apply no pressure at all, except for you, PartyBoy and LongTanJohnson."

Not that I don't have questions for Saint Benny. For instance, why is PartyBoy marking fucking Teal Bunbury on corners? And even bigger philosophically (though not in practice--Bunbury's goal was on Pontius, he knew it, and he thumped his own chest in acceptance in the afterglow), why the fucking fuck is a goddam moron like Brandon McDonald marking that giant Aurelien Collin, instead of the taller, smarter Dudar? Why, when Branko came up with a kneebummy, did you fucking put in another D-mid instead of, say, Stephen King, who once in a while shines in center attack (unlike Saragosa, who was not in any way cut out for the job he was asked to do last night)?

On to my critique of BFF's analysis, which is what prompted this post in the first place:

Worrisome if not distressing.

Take a Valium. It's one game. The outcome and the methodology were predictable--as, I concede, you're about to admit in a few sentences.

Minus DeRossario, minus Woolard (replaced by some journeyman with two workouts with the club) 

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Last night showed what DeRosario brings: bullying the rest of the team into running. Now, that's nontrivial, I'll admit. But we also left behind DeRosario blaming the rest of the team for him being 34 years old. As to Woolard, no. Just no.

And beloved, I'm not sure how you so easily spouted the most myopic, ill-informed, and goopingly unironic description of Mike Chabala that you possibly could, but...wow.

I wonder how much of it is United's lack of athleticism versus Kansas City's. Man for man, Kansas City was bigger, stronger, faster.

I long for the day when Japanese movie monsters run wild in the streets of Kensington, just so I can watch you flap your arms for a few seconds before I myself am consumed.

It's easy to look bigger, stronger, and faster than someone who's not moving. Athleticism...I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

They swarmed because they could. United panicked on the ball because they had too.

They swarmed because United didn't move, and didn't move the ball. United panicked on the ball because no one moved off-ball. That's part of the tactical deficiency Shatzer's talking about. Again, being too fucking lazy to do your job isn't a failure of athleticism, it's a failure of getting your deadwood road-gaming ass to move for some portion of 90 minutes.

Someone is going to take out Kitchen. He's dirty...

 Woot! I get to throw a bone!

Yes. Yes, he is.

He's also United's best player, but he's dirty.

Holy crap. Can you make just one point and move on before you completely fuck it up, beloved? No, he's not. Pontius is a better player. Hamid may be a better player. Boskovic may be a better player, but we'll never know because he's such a terrible fit for the club. Salihi may be a better player, but we'll never know because...

Long Tan sucks. Sucks. 

Well...only sort of, so far. Unlike anyone between Hamid and the front line (with the exception of Andy Najar, for 20-second stretches, and Danny Cruz, who came in far too late to have an impact), he worked for a living last night. He has the same problem everyone else on the team has--he can't volley, and I really wish that Saint Benny, who could volley, would fucking do some fucking drills on hitting balls on the half-volley, because the need to settle the fucking ball and make love to it before directing it goalward has gotten pretty fucking stale.

By which I do not mean to exclude the very real possibility that LongTanJohnson sucks.

Saragosa sucks. Sucks unto suck.

I disagree. Saragosa was--stunningly, I know--misused. Last night was, and I admit that there were challenges but still, a frightfully instructive example of how not to manage a formation with the players available. He was a terrible choice to plug in when Branko went down, without some adjustment of roles and relationships and positions.

Part of the thing here, and it's a part we're loathe to admit, is that Benny is a really, really fuckawful in-game coach, and a poor tactical manager. Can this improve? Maybe. Given time, he'll improve more in a year or two than Tommy Soehn or Curt Onalfo will for the rest of their lives.Will he get time? Will he deserve it? Beats the fuck out of me.

This is why this team is at least a year away - they would have lost this game with starters. Their second-stringers suck, and in MLS, you need good second-stringers. United doesn't have any.

That's where you're totally steering the boat onto the reef, beloved. You just said the second-stringers were all hurt. The bench was the third-stringers. Some of the regular starters are second-stringers, and the team has managed to correct for that enough of the time.

I disagree that they would've lost the game with starters--the only one not in was DeRosario. Might his arrogance and sheer dislikability have made the difference? I actually think it might've been the difference between a loss and a draw, but who the fuck knows? Would his presence have kept Benny from making the defensive adjustments that cost the game--or caused him to make different ones that worked? Not putting Dudar on Collin after the very first corner kick was a huge tactical error. Chabala's unfamiliarity with the system, which drew him so far into the middle that he lost his mark on the back post as the Traitor Graham Zusi charged in, certainly didn't help. Pontius in a crucial role in defense on another set piece (but wait! it worked with Tino Quaranta!) was sub-optimal, too.

I do seriously doubt that physical differences were the key here, given the stunning errors in judgment (didn't you hear me, half a county away, screaming about putting Dudar on Collin?) that both Saint Benny and the team laid out there last night. The really disturbing thing to me is that I knew we'd lose when we turned on the game. If, thousands of miles away, I knew that (and so, clearly, did BFF), what the fuck is going on with the team that they can project it so unerringly?

Harkes sucks.

Wynalda's wife doesn't think so. Boo-ya!

I miss The Bow-Tie, and The Bow-Tie sucked.

No, he didn't. He was the glue that kept us all together. He was goooood.

How I Confused My Literate Blogfriend. Or Not.

I have some. Literate blogfriends, I mean. Jim is way the fuck smarter than me, at least in his oeuvre and some nontrivial number of others, so I mostly just look at his pictures and skim over the stuff with the alphabets because it just gives me sads.

I discovered this thing today called the Flesch-Kinkaid Readability Index. It's pretty cool and utterly fucking meaningless. It calculates, in theory, the grade level at which you write, and the ease of readability of a given passage of text. I found it in some story about how congresscritters speak, on average, at a 10th-grade level, which was meant to be an insult. I shoved some work-related writing samples into this online calculator thing and discovered that I write at a 12th-grade level with a readability index of 41 (the lower the index, the more dense and incomprehensible the writing). A sample of recent Minions posts yielded scores of 10/50 (the Moog post), 12/47 (the hockey coaching post), 12/45 (the Mothers Day rant) and, stunningly, 10/54 (the Bam-Bam post, which earned me a cookie from Jim, and thanks for that, Jim). Jim's most recent prose post (other recent work has consisted of pictures and quotations), about Mittens' gay-hatin' garnered a 14/32. This makes Jim measurably smarter than me, so STFU, QED.

Yeah, it's a toy, and a pretty stupid one, at that. A Slate article I read about it called it "reductionist," and that's pretty spot on. Actually, I think it was a Weigel piece, so it probably couldn't decide whether it scored an infinity/infinity or a 6/smartass. But I had fun reductionizing myself.

So anyway, I lit into Himself, lovingly and a little bit, because the day had reached the point where I was no longer fit to do the things people pay me to do, and the peasants would've thought ill of me if I'd had the sedan chair brought around as early as 4:45. A little cruise led me to a brief mention of DCU midfielder Branko Boskovic, beloved by Himself because he's from one of those Balkan places, and Himself is also a 'Vic/'Vich, great-grandma from Buda and great-grandpa from Pest, or some such trifle, and he's all prejumidiced and suchlike. He claimed it's because he likes tens.

And I ranted, in the comments therein, about Tennism. You can poke over there for the rant, if you care, or not. Jim did, and I'm suspecting he regrets it, which is a shame because he's never done anything bad to me.

A ten is an center attacking midfielder, a playmaker who can also score. We're talking about footy here, by the way. Famous tens include Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane, and others I'm too lazy to remember, but knock yourselves out in the comments. Less famous tens--who are pretty significant here because they significantly contributed to BFF's and my conversion to Tennism (by playing for DC United), would be Marco Etcheverry and Christian Gomez (first tour of duty, pre-obesity). Less famous tens who made us wish for Marco Etcheverry and Christian Gomez, mostly because they weren't tens or were sucky or washed-up tens, would be Marcello Gallardo, the Ginger Fucking Midget (who may well have been shorter than Gallardo, who was nicknamed El Muneco--The Doll), Freddy Adu, Matias Donnet, Rod Dyachenko, Justin Mapp, Justin Moose, Santino Quaranta, Jamil Walker, Rodney Wallace, and Christian Gomez II (The Fattening). Some of those guys had value as footy players, but they all sure sucked balls as center attacking midfielders.

We really, really want Branko to be a ten. That's because he could be, although he prefers to play out left, because his right foot sucks every bit as much as the noodle dangling from the end of the late and lamented Marc Burch's right leg. And even though he's slower than Databoy trying to eat asparagus, and not a whole lot more enthusiastic about the team's preferred pace (to Branko's credit, he's shown more energy in the last two games, which he has started). It's also because we really like Dwayne DeRosario, who is probably more of a natural ten, and Hamdi Salihi, who is also probably something of a natural ten, up top.

Of course, in BFF's case, he also wants Branko to be a ten because of the fucking Balkan connection. But that's neither here nor there.

By the way, the other half of his ancestry is German, so he's not all bad. And he can't help that wrong side of Pennsylvania thing, so it's unfair to mock him for it, even though it is pretty tragifunny.

A point, a point, there was a point...right, how I confused Jim. I didn't. That was a lie. He pretended to be confused, and placed his cultural origins in...uhm...well, exactly the same generational spot as me and BFF, which really isn't very surprising at all, now, is it?

But the whole thing left me troubled and vaguely confused, and not because of Jim, because of the demons in my own shadows. Leaving only one place to turn:

These bunnies stripped Mary Ann and left her in the creek.

This bunny is enjoying itself just a little too much.

You can't fool me. This bunny is a motherfucking space alien.

 

These bunnies are creeping me the fuck out, but I'm guessing Sasha digs them.

Okay, I was wrong. These bunnies are creeping me the fuck out.

 Fucking rubes. You fall for the bunny trick every fucking time.
 

Hans Riemer Ate My Baby

Eye-catching, huh? For the record, he didn't. It's science. I'll report back to you sometime on the results.

So, not long after I posted a screed on Walmart Derangement Syndrome, which led to a very pleasant series of check-ins from bloggyfriends, I got a blast email from Councilmember Hans Riemer, of whom I have spoken variously in these pages, especially whenever I write about things local. That led me to Hans' blog, which is now linked off to the right somewhere, mostly so I remember to keep an eye on him. He's a recovering Californian, you know.

There are those of you who will disdain this personal involvement with the system. I do not begrudge your disdain any more than I begrudge Hans' energy for involving himself in the minutiae of government. Is he ambitious? Yeah, he is. Does he want to be one of our overlords? Hmm, yeah, he does, at least at some level of overlording--I've never asked him what he has in mind, and I've no idea if he knows what he has in mind, and if he does, he's sure not going to fucking tell the likes of me. Is he one of the 1 percent? Probably not. He's probably in about the same ballpark as I am, as far as that's concerned, and I really, really promise you that I'm not one of them. What makes him different?

Well, you're not going to like my answer to this, and I'm not going to contend that you should. The answer is: because I know him a little bit as a human. And I said so. So there.

Obviously, it would really be kinda seriously fucktarded for me to scorn any disagreement you might feel welling up at this point in the discourse.

The point? Right. Hans' blog. But first, also too: it turns out Hans is one of the five co-sponsors of the relatively pointless Walmart legislation. I should've figured that was the case. There's just no substantive political downside in MoCo to aligning yourself against Walmart. Duh on me.

So Hans' blog. I wrote him immediately when I saw it, expressing my hope that he was delegating blog production to some staffer. He replied quickly, telling me he does it himself. I believe him. The blog itself is pretty standard stuff, mostly diary, all designed to pump out Hans-centric stuff, as it should be. It's all Blooger-normal, and the tone is probably about right.

The links are local stuff, but...well, one of his links is Just Up The Pike, which I sometimes like and sometimes think is off its nut (as I did with the Walmart post, which started with a link to JUTP, which seems to think that Rockville Pike should be a walkable fake village from Route 28 to the Beltway; this idea is fucking silly). Another is Greater Greater Washington (both JUTP and GGW are linked from BFF's place, so I've never bothered). I've always read GGW respectfully, without necessarily agreeing with its POV, but I see that its most recent post (10/27/2011, and I'm not linking) is an affirmation of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Holy fucking shit. That's one of the most loathsome pieces of legislation ever. And the only thing GGW thinks is wrong with it is that it wasn't sufficiently funded. Holy fucking shit. GGW takes the farthest detour up its own ass when it talks about NCLB's teacher accountability provisions. Sure, it's good to be able to dismiss bad teachers, but NCLB links accountability to test scores. It has done more to dumb down education and water down critical thinking than any other measure since the advent of public education. It is the point source of teaching to the test. The GGW blogger refers to himself as an "educator," which means he's an administrator, not a teacher (if he were a teacher, he'd say so; if he were an administrator, he'd cloud it; bingo). Further, he weasels the issue by saying that he (as a "taxpayer," and like "lots of teachers") supports NCLB's goals for accountability. You might read that as softening his support for NCLB's approach; I read it as weasel shit, because if didn't support the approach, he wouldn't be sleeping with the enemy. Among the parts of NCLB he explicitly likes: allowing parents to pull their children from their local schools that don't meet AYP (average yearly progress, another loathsome and faux-metrics-driven feature of the law), and especially allowing parents to pull their children from "dangerous" high schools (he cites, stunningly, a high school in Prince Georges County--right, I see where we're going here).

I have never before seen a post this contemptible on GGW. It's so awful I won't link to it.

And I digress. Hans gets a cookie for blogging, and for taking the time to do it himself (it's his clock, what the fuck should I care?). The truth is that sources of information about our local locality are limited--even biased sources like GGW (yeah, okay, or me or BFF or JUTP or Your Fucking Washington Post) require some hunting. While I respect the perspectives of some of my bloggyfriends who have no use for government, I think it's okay for people to have some clue what their local overlords are thinking, and for my part, I trust that what Hans tells me in his blog is true, at least for a given value of truth unrelated to whether or not people vote for him.

Well, shit, all that took a left turn from where I started. Whatever. I think I started the post with the intent of picking out dumb shit Hans blogged and mocking it. Sorry, my assault on NCLB left me too winded to mock. My bad.

Update: Oh, shit, I forgot the actual professional criticism  (I'm an actual Web professional, you know): Hans, your labels suck balls. Get someone to go through them for you. You got librarians down there at the COB, I know you do.

Did You Know That BFF Will Ask You Today Whether You Know That DC Has A Professional Soccer Team?

Well? Did you? I now need a home game worse than I have ever needed a home game, and that includes opening nights.

Also, I tipped BFF to this bit over at Edroso's place, but I wanted to link to it also. Seems conservatives hate postmodernism because it's European and intellectual. I do too, but also because it wears black and likes Derrida (Damn! The Hooded Negro made his Derrida video private! Fucker!).

On Navelgazing

I love my friends. Honest, I really do. I'm not as horrible a person as I'd really like to be. But some days, I would like to be. It's neither politic nor kind to post one's horrible thoughts on one's friends' own blogs. Especially when I'm one. You are one, aren't you? But thoughts are had. Even for those I love best and most. Oh yes they are.

Hackneyed, true. Possibly even copyrighted, though I'll claim fair use--after all, they're just laying around on the Toobz. All that, none of it good. But expressive nonetheless.

And seriously. I love my friends.

Personal data: home after a week there. Here until I go there. Which is the day after Sweet Baby Jesus day. Un-fucking-real. I'd really like to tell you what I'm doing there. But I can't, because a certain part of the government would hunt down every one of you and grope the fucking Sweet Baby Jesus out of you. And you wouldn't like it. Even if you're into that sort of thing. Believe me, you're not that into it. Trust me on this. Because, as we noted, I love my friends. But to their navels, I say:

Peace out.

Obscure Rambling

I am told that BFF's inability to manage picture widths is deliberate. One of the beauties of having a BFF true is that we can mockingly and scathingly disagree about aesthetics, morality, the nature and importance of truth and beauty, and how badass black helmetball uniform jerseys look, come up gigglingly agreeing to disagree, and move on to the next topic, as long as neither of us becomes an actual Republican. And given various threats by each of us over time, the epistemological implications thereof, and the resulting results and fallout, I'm not even sure about that last bit. So here it is: while the picture widths blowing out his column widths are totally fucktarded, they're not indicative of anything beyond a little aesthetic fucktardery, which is by far the most liveable of the things over which we agree, by nature, to disagree.

In that same vein, I'd like to point out that, while we fear what we fear, and I find the Bay Bridge quite frightening, and we all fear for our children on a permanent sort of basis, I find neither the possibility of a supercollapse in the next three years nor Michelle Lissel all that compelling. Now, Barbara Manatee? She's the one for me.

I spent three days after my hospital release feeling utterly zombified. I'd like to blame my last post on that, but I can't, since I still seem to be brainsing the same topic, more or less. Today I woke up perky and feisty, and lived my life accordingly. Tomorrow? Who the fuck knows? And since this post is turning into exactly the sort of drivel that is the reason why I don't just post whatever's on my mind, and is in mortal danger of turning into a stream-of-consciousness vomit rainbow that would make Hunter Thompson kill himself all over again, I'll just check out until next time.

Briefly

I don't have anything to say. I've been away a lot, which really sucks. This week, I'm not away, but I'm recuperating, so I'm sleepy and sore from being rather massively (but benignly) invaded on Monday. Things are what things are, and I'm not writing to whine. I write today because BFF has a new place, and he seems quite proud of it, standing up with nearly perfect posture, back arched just a tad so his little boobies lead the way and his perfectly rounded caboose follows, so go give him a Hey Sailor (he invented the language, not me).

Critically: meh. He needs to figure out how pictures work in his template, and I've never been impressed with his use of color, which is not entirely pleasantly psychotropic on a good day and a nightmare from a Hell unimagined even by Dante on a bad one. He clearly likes the dynamic blogrollery he's seen at some fellow travellers' blogs, which is fine, when you're able to keep it segregated from the rest of your content.

But he's still working at it. It's not easy to get used to a new content management system, from a layout/design perspective. The new template is far superior to the old one--it makes use of far more space, and while there was something pleasingly Bauhaus about the sparing column widths of BFF's old Typepad space, it was his biggest problem, because he and his commentariat tend to ramble. A lot.


And now? I'm off to figure out how to make my little icon on his blogroll every bit as innovative and eyecatching as Elric's, though I'm almost certain that Blogger doesn't give me quite that much control over my own innards. And Elric's smarter than me anyway. Good thing I learned to live with that years ago.

You Can't Disappear the Intertubez

I know I promised to STFU about local politics, but this is effing hilarious. Y'all were probably sick of both my ranting and my constant links to Maryland Politics Watch during the runup to the recent Democratic primaries. MPW is a pretty good site, chock full of local political color, operated by Adam Pagnucco and David Lublin, both of whom seem to be okay guys.

Of course, it was a hotly contested primary season here in MoCo, and there were a lot losers. Some of them whine a lot, others don't (Credit where due: Councilwoman Duchy Trachtenberg, object of Minions' maximum revulsion during this election, popped off an exceedingly gracious and inoffensive thank-you note to her supporters; thanks, Councilwoman Trachtenberg, for bowing out without snivelling, and Minions wishes you all the best for the future, as long as you're not running for office in the state of Maryland.).

So yesterday, Pagnucco posted on MPW about the campaign manager for the aforelinked Dr. Dana Beyer, a candidate for Delegate in District 18. What? You say that link doesn't work? Hmm.

Maybe he took it down. But it's not like the post was offensive. It seems that Jena Grosser, the aforementioned campaign manager, was an unhappy soul while she was working for Dr. Beyer. How do we know? Well, she (or, it must be reckoned possible, someone purporting to be her) tweeted pretty incessantly during the campaign season about how miserable she was. Is there anything special or damning about it? Not really. It's the usual tweetie-twaddle about the frequency of one's bowel movements. I mean, she was pretty miserable, and it doesn't appear that her employer was giving her much in the way of logistics support for, say, living in the DC area (Ms. Grosser is a native of Indiana). Certainly her judgment is pretty suspect, putting that much personal stuff on the Intertubez. I wouldn't want her as my campaign manager. But then again, I'm not running for office, so WTF do I know?

But back to our friends at MPW. Taking stuff down, that's a pretty serious allegation, there. And utterly unsubstantiated, just like you'd expect from a potty-mouthed anonymous blooger like me, right?

Oops. And if that doesn't do it for you, Google-search "Maryland Politics Watch Jena Beyer" and you should be able to find your own cached version. Lookee:

So why, oh why, would MPW pull such a wonderful bit of political reporting? Well, I can tell you that there was a bit of a comments battle over this post, though if someone wanted to be snarky and vicious they could deny it, because it doesn't appear in the cached version, at least the one I found. There were, as of noonish today (about 22 hours after the post), 12 comments, about half attacking Pagnucco and the blog for being such meanies as to attack this Jena person so viciously over the private information she spread all over the freaking Web (and most of those were from someone who spends a lot of time scolding Pagnucco and other commenters over some pretty insignificant stuff). Most of the rest were by Pagnucco and Lublin, defending the post. One was by a blog supporter pointing out that what Pagnucco did is called "reporting." To be clear, my position is mostly in line with that last comment. None of the comments I saw really explained MPW pulling the post. Except maybe the last one I saw.

Now, I got only suspicions here. That last comment chided Pagnucco, advancing the theory that the post made his team (the winning District 18 Democratic team) look bad for trashing his team's opponent Beyer. There are a number of possibilities stemming from that. Did Beyer threaten some sort of action? Did Pagnucco's D18 team rip into him for the post? Did Pagnucco decide he couldn't afford for the post to be out there? Did the scold's taunt about the MoCo Dems' Kiss and Make Up Party (sadly, unattended by Dr. Beyer, according to Pagnucco's reporting) cause a little tiny tear to fall from Adam Pagnucco's eye?

Beats me. The previous paragraph, except for the factual statement about the last comment (that I saw), is all speculative. And for now, it'll remain so, because MPW pulled the post without explanation (at least up to this moment--I will update if that changes).

So, seriously, Adam, WTF?

In other political news, BFF bDr implicitly outs me as an agent of the global Takoma Park conspiracy. I have to say that, while this accusation staggers me, the prosecution has sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. No lo contendere.

That's right. Suck on Spiro Agnew, bitchez.

How Important Is Principle?

Nate Silver's blog, FiveThirtyEight, has been linked to your right since several days after its inception during the 2008 presidential primaries (during which two of my three best friends to whom I'm not married did some incredible gymnastics to convince you that their eventual corporatist tool was substantively better than the other corporatist tool, while I took a more realistic, balanced, Trumanesque, and ultimately correct view--and yes, I'm done, at least until the next time I'm not done).

FiveThirtyEight has published some outstanding statistical analysis, and Nate Silver certainly deserves to make a buck. I'm not at all pleased that he's moved the blog to the newspaper that started the war in Iraq, enamoured though fellow travellers are of it as an institution. Ordinarily, I'd dump him--not that he'd care, or that he should. I think the Times is up its own ass (as is our local journalistic institution). But FiveThirtyEight's work is too good, too reality-based, and too useful to dump on principle. Some middle-dwelling skeptics (you know who you are), or just plain smartasses, might suggest that I should consider the possibility that the blog is a sign of the Grey Lady lifting itself from the ashes of the destruction it has wrought. And I think we all know what I have to say to that.

So enjoy the money, Nate, and fuck you. Not that you should care.

Rearranging the Furniture

So I changed some stuff. Some links have moved, some have disappeared--actually, it's my most extensive housecleaning in some time. Some friends are gone, some because they haven't posted, some because I forget to read them. I added a Science link, to Scientopia, a new science blogging collective. I think that exactly one of you will care about that bit. Maybe.

And if you don't read the fine print at the top, you really should, once in a while. Because it does evolve.

I'm on vacation right now. That may mean I post stuff, and it may mean I don't. I did avoid having my vacation destroyed at the outset by a work problem. The corporate for which I tool is, from time to time, capricious (though not arbitrary), and part of my life will mutate into something not particularly welcome upon my return. Don't ask, it involves hillbillies (seriously) and a portion of our great country that is a very long way from the nearest airport that accepts passengers (and a longer way from a real airport). I can also tell you that news of this impending change made Sasha cry laughing.

Enough whine, I chose to be a tool. For now, vacation.

Meanwhile, On Other Peoples' Blogs

I suspect that very few of you are following the fussin' and feudin' over at Scienceblogs, where Orac is whimpering impotently and PZ has gone on strike and a crapload of people, most of whom I've never read, are leaving, and that fewer of you care (assuming that "fewer" is even a valid mathematical concept in this instance). In a nutshell, Seed Media sort of fucked all of the Sb crowd by starting a nutrition blog written by PepsiCo, and apparently none of the Sb bloggers have seen paychecks (wotta blogging concept, but then, I don't pretend to significance) since spring.

I've altered the sidebar link for Orac, who is for me a daily read, to his permalink, in case he bolts. And I only go to PZ when someone tells me there's something special there.

I know that most of you don't give a fuck about the Science section, and that at least one of you actively dislikes Orac and another thinks PZ is an ass. Kiss the cow, whatever. You know the sidebar substitutes for my favorites list, or for a private online links list, though it's poorly maintained at best.

Anyway, just wanted to share a little, and knock down yesterday's spittlefest directed at my still-beloved BFF.

Sure, Whatever

Okay, after the third "Are you alive?" email of the last two days: Yes. Yes, I am. Just busy. Houseguests/tourists, and a workplace that, it appears, is way too fucking dependent on...me. Which is entirely and without qualification my own damn fault, and scandalous and shameful and a testament to my own stubborn frailties.

I'm not too busy or whiny to welcome friend D back to the blogroll, with a waggle toward bDr for discovering D's re-emergence from...wherever he was. Welcome back, D, and like I said, thanks for the jelly roll.

I'm also not too busy to send love and thanks to good pal Gimme (if you know him, you do, if you don't, you won't) for an awesome inside tour of the Capitol today for me, Databoy, and our guests. And to BooBooKittyfuck and Mrs. BBKF and all our shared friends for a great party, and to Catonsville, Maryland for an utterly remarkable small-town fireworks display, and to Sasha and Whispers (and our guests, who are Canadian, and my wife, who is not), for a perfect Fourth (which I don't boycott, because that's every bit as fucking pig-ignorant as a Lee Greenwood song), and to Albert Einstein for a most excellent street corner, and to Gettysburg for itself.

And thanks, as always, to Maya Lin for reminding me again why I lovehate her fucking wall. Into which topic I will not delve further today, because picking 40-year-old scabs is just astonishingly bad.

Baiting To Oblivion

I actually think Bob Somerby is a pedantic scold who knows better than most how to beat a dead horse to pulp. There are things I respect about him, which is why his site has been linked to your right ever since I figured out how to lay such things out. His neverending mewling over the rape of Al Gore is a fine example of my characterization; he's not wrong on the facts or the substance, and there's no statute of limitations on the crimes the media, Gore's political opponents, and the Supremes perpetrated against him. On the other hand, Somerby's nearly decade-old vendetta against his media contemporaries is getting a bit stale, and frankly, I'm not going to start liking Chris Matthews now that he sometimes pretends to be a liberal again. Al's rich enough to pay for his carbon offsets. In the scheme of preventable and rightable crimes against humanity, there's stuff I'd rather lose sleep over.

I've come close, a few times, to writing about Somerby and The Daily Howler, but on those occasions when I've felt quite nearly peeved enough to comment, my grievance has turned out to be reducible to triviality, not worth the effort to log in to Blooger, either to write about it or to take him off my blogroll. It's probably true that my reaction to Somerby is visceral; his tone and phrasing and emphasis sometimes--maybe too often--come off as pure-D concern troll. But I don't think that's what he is. He is genuinely a liberal, and the problem enters because he's ideologically, epistemologically, and dialectically pure. Admirable traits--but not qualities that make him seem like something other than a concern troll (and truly, it's not like he's looking for a fight, like a real concern troll--he has no comments functionality on his blog, and I haven't seen him turning up in other peoples' neighborhoods chiding them for not caring enough that Al Gore is leaking Naomi Wolf's bodily fluids).

Wow. Two introductory paragraphs on love and hate, just because I'm intrigued by an idea Somerby has. I guess I feel I need to justify--to myself, since I'm the one both writing and reading this--linking to the guy's major product. It's fairly obvious that Somerby has a knack for twisting my nads about my own complicity, as if I needed more help with that (and at a far more personal level than Somerby could provide) than I get nearly every day.

Anyway, Somerby is pitching the idea that we're killing ourselves by screaming that the Teabaggers (an epithet he hates, but he can, well, lick my bag, to make a related dick joke that he'd particularly despise, because his various forms of purity include a, well, puritanical streak and an obsession with fairness toward people who are completely unconcerned about being fair to us) are racists. I'm unable to conclude that he's wrong. It's hard not to conclude that Teabaggers are stupid--they are. It's hard not to conclude that they're largely racists--they are. There's simply no rational argument about either, and little or no point in engaging the argument. But Somerby is painfully correct when he calculates the political wisdom of banging on those two drums without far more substantial and compelling accompaniment.

Yesterday's post notwithstanding, I genuinely try not to scold for real. Anything I write about dogma-N isn't really a scold; it's another chapter in 40 years of rough-and-tumble, yet purely playful, oneupsmanship with one of my most trusted confidantes, and in a long process of trying to entertain one another. Seriously scolding Somerby for scolding me (and you) gives me pause; but like Celia the Sylph, he's far too impressed with how fucking right and pure and good he is. Which doesn't mean he's wrong about how we ought to discourse publically with and about pig-ignorant racists.

Them What Walk

My friend Jon is commencing an Appalachian Trail adventure in a few weeks, and I've added his blog to the thingummies on the right. I have my own range of AT stories, as does this guy, and this guy. Some of the stories intertwine, some don't. But they'll not be told right now.

A Punch In The Balls

Housekeeping first; as the last Xtranormal movie warned, I'm not going to blog that way for some time. It limits my expression, it keeps this guy from being able to easily grab quotes¹ from me so that I get published in a higher-traffic blog (which is, as we all know, my sole raisin), it's getting repetitive (although everyone loves the Ilse dance), and most importantly, the scripts that Xtranormal loads as a result of the embeds significantly slow down my site's load time (UPDATE: Gee, the site seems to load much faster this morning, just not having an embed as the top post.). For that reason, I'll leave the embeds as they are for a bit, then convert them to links in a week or two. Or less, if I have time and get really sick of the slow loads.

Let's move on to the topic of the night, which this guy correctly, understatedly, and uncharacteristically (for him--he's obsessed with keeping his blog clean, although I hope he never kisses me with that mouth, even though he's a total sex god) referred to as "a punch in the balls."

As you will find from other sources, DCU lost at New England tonight, only its second loss of the season, and only 2-1, after a more-or-less acceptable first half and a not very good second half. As D pointed out in his first impressions, they shouldn't have been in a position to lose.

That said, center official Hilario Grajeda called a travesty of a game. The centerpiece of it was a fuckawful penalty in the 89th minute against Brian Namoff. Grajeda blew the whistle a full six seconds after Taylor Diving Fucking Twellman flopped backwards and pretended Namoff had pulled him down.³ D offers that he'll forgive Grajeda if it develops that the assistant referee thought it was a penalty.

I won't. The assistant referee had a better angle (for once--offsides calls coming from that A.R. were consistently off, too, in both directions), but a more distant view. It should've been obvious to him that Namoff didn't pull the diving fucker down. I also won't forgive Grajeda because, in the last minute of stoppage, he didn't call a penalty when Rodney Wallace was blatantly and obviously pulled down, by the jersey, in the box, as he was trying to play a pretty well-placed cross. The foul committed against Wallace was far more egregious--and booking-worthy--than the foul Namoff was alleged to have committed.

That was the worst of it, but Grajeda lost control of the game early and kept paying for it. Sainey Nyassi should've been booked three or four times, by my count; the inept fucking moron actually booked Josh Wicks for making a fucking save--again, because Taylor Diving Fucking Twellman fell down and rubbed his pussy; and he consistently overlooked bumping and shirt-tugging. Some of it cut both ways, but when it counted, Grajeda very clearly and decisively favored the home team (or maybe he was getting Taylor Diving Fucking Twellman's jersey after the match).

This is getting old. Sometimes MLS officials' ineptitude is just plain distracting, as it was in the USOC game at RFK against the Red Scum. That was a dreadfully officiated game, and fortunately the game was so decisive that the referee couldn't fuck it up. Mostly. Other times, entire games revolve around asinine decisions by people who shouldn't be in the middle of a pitch.

It's also a credible view that the team shouldn't have been in a position to go down on a 90th-minute penalty. But that doesn't matter. If you live on the edge, that's where you live, and if you keep getting yourself out of the deep cacky, you have a right not to be put back in it by utter fucking incompetence.

I've been hard on Tom Soehn. I've softened that view the last couple or three games, although I still think that his mentality--and thus the team's--is entirely too defensive. I think Soehn has some heat to take for tonight's effort. The Rev have some speedy motherfuckers on the wing, and playing a slow 3-5-2 against that is just bone fucking dumb (I'm not the first person to say this: has Tom Soehn ever played Football Manager?). On the other hand, the lineup was well-chosen (the subs weren't--McTavish was a dumbass sub from a coach who swears he wants to bring Jacobson into the offense more, and I'd have brought in Moreno before Mister Sulu, although it was appropriate not to start Jaime), and the team's effort in the first half didn't seem to reflect a bunker mentality. Wicks shouldn't, in my view, have to take much of a rap; he made a great and appropriate effort on the Shalrie Joseph goal, and Joseph just plain beat him, though Jacovic (I think it was him--whoever was defending the cross on the right side just got stomped on that play⁵) probably should.

After all of my rant, D still said it better and best: what a fucking punch in the balls.

¹ While I'm on the topic, I am putting a jihad on him for not doing a full debrief on the RSL game, thus leaving to the book of unwritten history this best six-word game summary evar: "They're the real hot item, Powdermilk."<sup>2

2</sup> Yes. I'm done now.

³ Some are contending that Grajeda called a handball on Jacovic that was simultaneous with the Twellman dive. Twellman didn't think so. On the other hand, he tells us in the same interview that he also thinks he has a God-given right for the goalkeeper to get the fuck out of his way and let him score, and that failure to do so constitutes a penalty, so I'm not sure I want to bank anything on what Taylor Diving Fucking Twellman⁴ thinks.

⁴ Way more discommodated (as a Terp) than Tino Quaranta ever was or ever will be as a human.

⁵ UPDATE: I now think it was Pontius who got punked there, adding another slice of flat to what was really not a very good game for the lad. Who this guy doesn't like any more anyway.

Perversity in Sports

Heh. You thought you were gonna get pictures of WAGs.

Last night I went to RFK to see United begin its defense of the US Open Cup. I didn't stay home and watch the Caps lose to the Rangers to go down 3-1 in their playoff series. Did I make the right choice? I can't decide.

I went in expecting the Cup defense to be about 92 minutes in length, and I was pleasantly surprised when a fundamentally reserve lineup beat Dallas' fundamentally reserve lineup. That said, Dallas really, really sucked. They brought in star dickweed Kenny Cooper late in the game, and he rewarded them by banging his penalty kick off the post (and then illegally putting the ball in the net before another player touched it--a subtlety which escaped a lot of people, including, it appears, DCU's goalkeeper). They were essentially hapless. That really limits the amount of good news I'm willing to take away from a game in which Fred walked the ball into the net (and nearly didn't), and this guy (intellectual property credit to this guy):

donkeyed it in from 22 yards off of a for-once-our-way bounce. The beautiful thing about the goal is that it came well after the 52-minute mark, which was about when Soehn started to thank the 2,000 of us who showed up (each of us counting for about 2.5 bodies in the announced count) by heading for the bunker. Take that, Soehn, you bitch. You better hope every team's as bad as the Burn.

Really, I can't complain about the game. I'm not sure I watched the same game WaPo guy Goff did; his ratings sort of suck. He was overimpressed by Barklage, and by Greg Janicki, whose handball let to the failed PK. I said the handball was incidental and the PK was a judgment call; the aforementioned bDr played the "what if it happened to us?" card, for which he can bite my shorts, although I admit that I don't know what a ref could do other than award a PK or wave the thing off, since they're not really supposed to find a way to even these things up. The wanktard Mr. Soehn seems to think I'm wrong, too (he blamed Janicki's inexperience, which suggests a perception of willfullness), so I'll have to go find footage and flagellate myself with it until I agree with the rest of the universe on this one.

Anyway, Goff was also overimpressed by Quaranta, who starts off any game with a minus three rating in my book, and way underimpressed by BoyZZZ (who ran his ass off but made two bad, but inconsequential, flow-of-play decisions) and Jacovic (who did a fine job of making it look like the team wasn't bunkering, by moving forward from his right-side slot).

Also in Goffinho's quotes: Soehn hedges his bets on Milos Kocic, dismisses Santino Quaranta's hamstrings (I think Tino is a lot of bad things, but I don't think he's shirking), shuns the novel notion that attacking is good ("For [Moreno], it's always good to bring him in, hold the ball and kill off a game."--I thank you for the readiness with which that phrase springs to your lips, Tom, and I'm sure your team's captain thanks you for going to him first when you need to do nothing productive in the course of a game), and backhands both Janicki (aforementioned) and Reg Barclay. Soehn also dissed Louis Crayton in his commentary on Kocic, praising Kocic for doing the same shit Crayton does, only dumber. I guess it all rests on how Tommy's feeling about his fiber intake from day to day. As bDr said a few weeks ago, I'd sure hate to play for this guy.

I can't articulate this very well right now, but I'm getting a little sick of Goff, too. I'll have to think on that one a bit before I take it on. He's a fine writer, but he's starting to radiate more of a smug quality that's putting me off. I'll be back to you on this. Just as soon as I figure out how to blame it on Soehn.

Exploiting Your Fear, Mofo

I've tried very hard. Very, very hard. It's not easy to hit people you love with big pieces of lumber. But there's only one way I'm going to get through here. Let's rock:

Once upon a time there was a very scary preznitential candidate.

Life was, in many ways, perfectly happy and cool, but as so often happens, a wolf lurked in the fold.

Bad things happened. Fear was caused.

People got kinda wack, did some stuff they wouldn't usually do. Some really weak shit, actually.

In short, they panicked. They were total pussies, frankly.

They forgot about the real enemy because they were so focused on their own fear of one shrill, dumbass preznitential candidate. They even went so far as to dream she had them by the short and curlies. And, after a fashion and solely because of their pussyassed fears (ostensibly of the shrill dumbass, but really of fear itself), she almost did.

Then they ignored her and their pussyass fears and everything was fucking A cool like Fonzie, mofos.

Let's tell the story a slightly different way. There's a spooky myth that if you say a dead person's name in the bathroom mirror three times,

he'll appear behind you:

Stop saying her name and she'll go away. Just fucking be cool like Fonzie, would you, mofo?

On The Plight of the Neutral Observer in a War Zone

1. BPWTF? Since I'm not sure I'm at liberty to reveal the connection, I won't. Let's just say it's pretty deeply rooted.

2. Conrad. Conrad is soused and lives in Turkey. He's from the same minion gene pool as Purple and Whispers.

3. Conrad's brother Conrad Graham (the blog formerly known as I Don't Care If You Don't Like Me). Way the fuck less soused than he used to be, and lives in Philadelphia. Also from the same minion gene pool as Purple and Whispers. Cute as a fucking bug, and far less annoying.

4. Kitten Wars. Smart money's on the cracker. The intellectual doesn't have the stomach for a long war.

5. Speaking of which, don't you people ever learn?

The Golden Swiss Bunnies of the Apocalypse. Surrender and get really fat thighs.

No, this bunny's going to kick your ass. Seriously. Appropos of nothing, I found this bunny at a publication called New Lesbian Times. I do not know what that means.

Clorg supporters.

Hello Dweeze.

Seriously, dogs just suck.

If Rose McGowan as an armed amputee isn't the hottest fucking bunny ever, I don't know what is.

Obama supporters.

Nothing is safe from performance art.

Dilettantes.