Chargers v. Titans Thread

Watching here with the fam. For those who are TVless like me can watch it streaming live here.

My Name's TNC With The Mic In My Hand...

...And I'm chilling and cooling just like a snowman.

Merry Christmas folks!

Herman Meville--Badass

It really isn't right to talk about that speech and then not cite Melville, given how Moby Dick is invoked at the end of the scene. Continue after the jump if you're interested.

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And I Will Make Them Pay

Andrew is saluting Patrick Stewart on his impending knighthood. No salute to Stewart is complete without this turn as Picard at the climax of First Contact.




Lott lefties need to watch this one. There's so much in this scene, or rather I see so much in this scene. From Kujo to Cochise to Samori Ture to Robert Charles to Malcolm X. Of course the upshot is about understanding when the fight is lost, or rather the distance between what might be deserved and what is actually possible.

Malcolm was, for the most part, dealing with what was deserved, what was owed to us. But the fact of the matter was, as King I think recognized, we were outnumbered and terribly outgunned. It's very hard to reconcile yourself to the reality of being dependent on people who don't really like you. It's hard to accept that there won't be any payback, or any real apology--that it isn't even possible. But it was where we were/are. There's no other way.

I think back to a conversation I had with Andrew some time ago. He was talking about some buddies who wanted to wear shirts that said "I hate the straights" or "Fuck the straights" or some such. And he was explaining how he told them. "Go ahead, it might make you feel better. You might even be justified. But while you're doing it, understand that it won't work." I'm probably mangling that story. But we were talking about the same thing--the space between the tangible and the deserved.

And then it gets deeper than that on a moral level. Who is to say what is deserved and what isn't? What would we have done, had we the ships and guns? Would would Shaka have done? Are we really that different?

Open Thread At Noon

For all those not traveling, and heathens like me. Go for it.

"If You Hit 'Em Low It's Good Luck..."

I'd urge all wrestling fans to check out Lipstick and Dynamite, a documentary on old school female wrestling. I watched it a couple years back, and found the women to just be amazing. I wanted to embed to the trailer, but it's chock full of pronouncements about "equality" and "breaking barriers." That's all cool. But tell me a fucking story. It's like the people who cut the trailer didn't trust the film so they inserted all this activist-speak. Which is too bad. Because it's wonderful. A couple clips below and after the jump.

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Blogger, Please

Over at The Root, Jerry Bembry thinks thinks the cop who pulled his gun is getting a raw deal:

The officer overreacted, and he should be reprimanded. But he wasn't the biggest idiot on the scene. The biggest idiot was the guy who, snowball in hand, reared back and took aim at an armed officer. With Mariano Rivera-like accuracy, he fired a snowball and connected with the officer's face.

Did I mention that the officer, already pissed off, was holding a gun?

In throwing a snowball at an armed, angry man, that man callously put his life--and the lives of everyone else around him--in jeopardy. It's doubtful that he knew, as he threw the snowball, that the guy was a cop. What if he hadn't been a cop, but a passing thug who didn't take too kindly to being disrespected? A thug might have been inclined to light up the clown who threw the snowball at his face, and everyone else around him.

In an era where everyone has a camera, the video of the incident has gone viral. The reaction of the officer has outraged many people. As I read several comments at the end of some of the stories and videos relating to the incident, some of that outrage is misguided.

The officer involved is black, and quite a few commentators thought race had something to do with the incident. One of the comments described it as a typical reaction to an overzealous black cop.

Another called the cop "racist, picking on those white kids. If those kids were black he would have let it go."

My favorite reaction was from someone who wrote that had the incident "been reversed, i.e. a white off-duty cop and a predominately black crowd of snow ball throwers, I'm sure Al Sharpton would be in D.C. right now blowing things out of proportion and making it a racial incident."

This is a textbook case for why I really dislike anything that smacks of strawmanning. Counterarguments that begin with "One of the comments" or "Another" but don't actually cite the commenter, or in this age link to them, leave you to grapple with a paraphrase from a biased party, as opposed to engaging the argument as it was made by its proponent. It's really impossible to take the "racist" charge seriously. Who made it? In what context? It''s like taking a drunk off the street, and making his inebriated blathering the face of your opposition. It's lazy. It's cheap. And from the New York Times to the Washington Post, it happens all the time.

Lazy tactics prop up lazy arguments. I think we can all agree that throwing a snowball at an armed man--cop or otherwise--is dumb as fuck. It's a reckless, arrogant, stupid act that endangers you and everyone in the vicinity. I think we can also agree that yelling "Fuck you pig!" or some such is the kind of thing that makes those of us who live in fear of the police chafe. Lastly, I think, for black people, and especially those of us who've had friends killed by the cops, it's particularly grating to be confronted with the fact that we live under different rules.

But that said, an argument about who was "the bigger idiot" is really beside the point. One idiot lacks home training. The other idiot lacks professional training. One idiot is a dumb-ass kid. But the other idiot is a salaried, pensioned employee of the state, whose job specifically entails not acting like an idiot. One idiot thinks he's empowered to throw snowballs at cops. The other idiot is, as a matter of law, empowered to throw hot-ones. One idiot might ruin your Hummer. The other idiot might ruin your life--and then go to work the next day.

They aren't the same, and soft-peddling the act of drawing a gun in snowball fight in hopes of spiting some stupid kid, is the kind of dumb-ass tribalism that ultimately hurts the tribe. D.C. is a majority black city, and this guy has been on the force for over a decade. If he's acting as he was--on camera--toward a group of predominantly white kids, imagine how he's acted toward black kids over the years. Imagine how he'll act towards your kids in the future.

The Great Jim Cornette On Obama And Health Care

I pretty much take it for granted that most of the cats I love in wrestling are conservatives. Anyway, here's Jim Cornette speaking his piece on why he supports Obama and health care reform. For an old school fan, this is some amazing audio. It's Jim Cornette, same dude that repped the Midnight Express, repping Obama. He needs to be on talk radio. He always talked better than Stan Lane or Bobby Eaton. I don't even remember Beautiful Bobby talking, or Dennis Condry.

After the jump check Cornette repping the Beautiful Bobby and Stane Lane. That Ethiopian and fried chicken line is pretty amazing. Don't know if you can do that today. But he was playing the heel. On the real though, give Cornette a radio show. I loved him back in the day. He was iller than Bobby "The Brain" Heenan and Classy Freddie Blassie.

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The Gangsta Rapper Tully Blanchard

None of you can be first. But all of you can be next...
    --Ric Flair

I watched Ric Flair and The Four Horsemen with the boy the other night, and it really struck me how Bad Boy/Death Row these dudes were. The whole aesthetic--"private jets...finest women...most expensive cars...biggest house"--is basically what popular hip-hop became as it matured. And then of course emphasis on mike skills (someone in the doc literally called it that, I think it was Triple H) the ability to be able to talk, almost off the dome, and expound on the character your playing.

Likewise, there were all these moments where wall of reality came down. If you listen to Arn Anderson talk, it's really not clear when he's talking himself or when he's talking about the character he's playing. Less interesting, but still with on the same theme, is the Flair v. Bischoff beef. You have a guy basically cursing out his boss in front of millions of viewers, except he means it. Of course a lot of the similarities boil down to the respective target audience for wrestling and hip-hop--young boys. Hip-hop pulls from the post-pubescent angst, and wrestling pulls from post-pubescent fantasies. Of course the "rapping" in wrestling is ultimately centered around an actual fight, and is a little less meta. But while I loved watching, say, the Road Warriors do work, I think I liked listening to Ric Flair rap at least as much as I liked watching him wrestle.

One thing I'd like to know more about is what actually makes a "good wrestler." They were pretty harsh on Sid Viscious and Lex Luger, basically saying that these were two big muscle-bound dudes who had all of the physical skills, but zero technique. I'd love to have heard more about it. As a fan, I knew Ric Flair and Arn Anderson were great, in the sense that I liked watching them. But I didn't actually know why.

A shout out to Triple-H, Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes. They all had some really sharp points about wrestling and what the Four Horsemen meant. Triple H had a great breakdown on how the Horsemen fit into the whole psychology of the 80s. He talked about how Dusty Rhodes, the son of the plumber, represented the common man going to war against Horsemen, on the representation of villainous, capitalist excess. And capitalist excess almost always won.

Also a shout out to Tully Blanchard. I had forgotten how good this cat was. It's almost sad that he was teamed with Flair. I think he overshadowed him a bit. Blackness ran deep through all of these guys. Or call it The South, if you want. You get to a point where you can't separate anymore.

A Really Stupid Lie

Hopefully Obama will clean this up, but there really is no reason for saying, "I didn't campaign on the public option" Dude, yes you did:

Specifically, the Obama plan will: (1) establish a new public insurance program, available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees.

I guess this could depend on what the meaning of "campaign" means, but let's no go there. Just say you wanted it and didn't get it. From Ezra:

Obama's latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That's even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it's a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama. Obama could have given an interview where he expressed frustration that the math of the Senate forced his administration to give up the public option but nevertheless argued that the rest of the health-care bill was well worth passing. Instead, he's arguing that he never cared about the public option anyway, which is just confirming liberal suspicions that they lost that battle because the president was never really on their side.

I can't really remember who made this point, and I would link to it if I could, but someone noted that all of this is about not having a head-line that says, "Obama Suffers Huge Loss In Health Care Fight." It just feels like politics, if you can say you didn't campaign on the public option than you can say you got the reform you wanted.

Not Helping

Via Radley Balko, we have a dude who did ten years on triple murder set free because, well, the state, among other things, destroyed evidence. Mind you he hasn't been exonerated, and may well have did it. But the cops and prosecutors cut corners trying to nail him and now he's on the street.

If you're interested in putting the right people in jail, you aren't doing any favors by being sloppy. This isn't said enough. Destroying evidence isn't a "favor" to the all the innocents criminals prey upon, any more than blowing the rent money to take your kid school shopping is an act of love.

Out For The Morning

Will get back to posting this afternoon guys. Talk amongst yourselves.

There Are No Poor White People

Yglesias highlighted this the other day, and I ignored it because I thought it was a slip of the tongue. But here's Lindsey Graham, again, equating poor people with black people, or some such. A charitable interpretation says that Graham, in his discussion of Medicaid, is citing his state's black population because we tend to be disproportionately poor. But this would be like discussing Medicare by citing your state's sweater-knitting population because they tend to be disproportionately old. 

It's probably much worse--most sweater-knitters may well be on Medicare, but most black people aren't actually poor or on Medicaid. And so what your left with, again charitably, is a kind of mental laziness, and weak, mealy-mouthed, factually wrong conflation of black people and the poor. A lot of bourgeois Negroes, like myself, spend too much time being offended by this kind of conflation. In fact the people who should be offended are the white people Lindsey Graham represents.

The charitable interpretation rests on the invisibility of white suffering. It rests on the erasure of Clay County. It rests on the notion that the white poor are not merely the white poor, but white trash. It's a formula makes an anchor of black America, straps it to a larger population of poor white Americans and then drops them in the Mississippi. It's a con that asks large swaths of white folks to suffer poverty in shame and silence.

No black person can end this alone, nor should we have to. The NAACP shouldn't say a word to Lindsey Graham. We can not purify people. We can't stop those who are set on blinding themselves. Ignorance is the burden of the ignorant. You learn this when you live black--or you learn the penal system. It's time to spread the glorious news.

I'll Show You How To Fleece A City

From Robert Conot's American Odyssey, I present Richard "Double Dip Dick" Reading, mayor of Detroit in the late 30s:

No sooner had Reading taken office than he complained that his fifteen thousand-dollar salary was not enough to support him in the style to which he had become accustomed as city clerk. Appointing his son as his executive secretary, he proceeded to utilize his powers as "strong mayor" to establish himself as the vice-czar of the city--a development members of the Good Citizens League had not foreseen when they had succeeded in eliminating the corruption of the ward bosses. Nicknamed "Double Dip" Dick because he demand a take-off not only for himself but also for his son, Reading had a take as high has $55,000 a month. Top Jobs in the police department were so lucrative that there was open bidding, and promotions went to the highest bidder.

Affable and punning, Reading might well have presided for years over his citywide gaming establishment had it not been for the fatal despondency of a jilted lover. In August, 1939, a bookkeeper in a policy joint murdered child and committed suicide after being spurned by her boyfriend. On her body she left letters addressed to the FBI, the governor, and the newspapers, charging that her boyfriend was a "bag man" for the police department. Payoffs to top officials were detailed.

Never had a greater sensation burst upon the city. Circuit Judge Homer Ferguson was appointed as a one-man grand jury. Among the 135 persons indicted were the mayor and his son, the county prosecutor, the sheriff, the superintendent of police, Joe Louis's manager and 80 police officers.

Man. Nothing like that old school Boss Tweed corruption.

But Buy My Memoir First...

Occasionally, I have to promote myself, so here we go. I wrote a book about my life in West Baltimore. Came out about a year ago. In said book, I tried to write pretty, and at some points, succeeded. If you like the pop culture mix of this blog--NFL, D&D, music--then this book is for you. If you don't like any of those things, this book is still for you. It's that awesome.

Don't believe me? Check out this handy trailer. Sorry, no Eddie Murphy. Lotsa Paul Coates, though...OK, so maybe Eddie after the jump...

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Breakerbaker Goes On Hardball

At about five minutes in, Matthews starts channeling our resident commenter.

In all seriousness, I was never clear that she was saying "Kill the Bill." Maybe people are retrenching given the pushback from people who also think Lieberman is disgusting, but the bill should be passed. I think we're having visions of Ralph Nader.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Price Of JaMarcus

Well he got a 24 on his Wonderlic. Clearly he was smart enough! Whatever. Here's Andrew Brandt attempting to break down the cost:

There you have it: $39.4M in cash committed with a potential $18M cap hit for a player it appears the Raiders can't purge soon enough.

It's hard to believe there's ever been so much paid for so little.

Russell should be financially secure for life as well as his family. But he may soon have to declare bankruptcy on his career.

I don't know. Knowing Al Davis, if not JaMarcus, it would have been someone else. Also, I'd probably throw out his rookie year in these calculations. But that said, even with Sunday's victory, he really seems headed for bustville. He needed some actual coaching around him, and an organization that cared.

Open Thread At Noon

Take it away...

Your Androgony Makes Me...Uncomfortable

The Onion once had this great caption: "Guy Totally Looked Like A Chick From Behind." Come on, you know you've been there. Anyway, I thought about that reading through this comment string, on whether one of the singers in the MGMT "Kids" video is a girl:

Um, I really do think, and hope, the second painted figure is a girl and not a guy. Not that's there's anything wrong with that!

Turns out she is. But when I first saw it, I thought I was watching the official video. Knowing that MGMT was two dudes, I thought the girl was a dude. I told Kenyatta last night that I found myself thinking, "Wow, that's a really nice looking dude...So much in fact that I can't take my eyes off of him...OK, this is awkward..."

Haha. Seriously, I would have been fine if she were a dude. Seriously. Totally. Fine.

The Longest Journey

Here's A handy, if rudimentary, FAQ for people who haven't been following this stuff. Also, here's an old, but helpful, post by Ezra on the exchanges. One reason why it's very hard for me to get with the "kill the bill" sentiment is this:

Federal subsidies are meant to make health insurance affordable for lower-income Americans who cannot now afford to pay premiums. So under the Senate bill, individuals and families who earn less than four times the federal poverty level and do not have access to employer-sponsored insurance will receive tax credits to subsidize health insurance.

Using the 2009 federal poverty level, that works out to any individual earning below $43,320, a couple below $58,280, a family of three below $72,240 or a family of four earning less than $88,200.

Anyone earning less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level (about $14,079 for an individual or $28,665 for a family of four) would be eligible to enroll in Medicaid.

And then this chart which looks at families up to 400 percent of the poverty line. Two things here: first, while I don't want need Obama or his people going around saying this, the fact is that this is going to help a lot of people in Harlem. I hate the phrase "wine track," but Ron Brownstein's race/class critique of the "Kill The Bill" crowd makes a good point.

Second, a look at African-American history shows that the legal fight--from the banning of the slave trade to affirmative action--was long and plagued with missteps. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the Union--but if you were in, or made your way to, occupied territory it was a godsend. For most of its existence, the Fourteenth Amendment was effectively flouted by half the country. But it was also the basis for Brown v. Board.

The war is long. When you've outlasted Strom Thurmond, Joe Lieberman is cake.

Don't Know How I Missed This...

But yeah, don't pull out a gun during a snowball fight--even if you're a cop. I should add that it takes a particular arrogance to throw a snowball at a dude with a gat--cop or not. Still, the more I see these cases, the more I become convinced that there's an appallingly low standard for those who are licensed to kill on our behalf. Maybe, given the type of people who want to be cops, this is as good as it gets. I don't know.

The fact that "there are only a handful of bad cops" cuts no ice with me. If only a "handful of McDonald's are spitting in your food" your not going to McDonalds. Likewise, I don't even ask the cops for directions. Better to take my chance with a dude on the street. At least if he decides to shoot me, he stands a chance of being prosecuted.

Faking Evidence

Live from New York:

The New York State Police's supervision of a major crime laboratory was so poor that it overlooked evidence of pervasively shoddy forensics work, allowing an analyst to go undetected for 15 years as he falsified test results and compromised nearly one-third of his cases, an investigation by the state's inspector general has found.

The analyst's training was so substandard that at one point last year, investigators discovered he could not properly operate a microscope essential to performing his job, the report released on Thursday said.

Prosecutors aren't worried:

But on Thursday, police officials said that none of the district attorneys had found that Mr. Veeder's work had cast doubt on any of their convictions.

"We are satisfied that there were no wrongful convictions, nor any miscarriages of justice which resulted from these improper procedures," Mr. Corbitt said, stating a viewpoint also shared by Mr. Fisch.

Right. Because if there were, you'd come out and tell us. I really wish I could believe you.

Rasslin And Political Correctness

There's a part early in my memoir where my older brother (Big Bill) and I are debating with my Pops over whether wrestling is "real." At the time, we were watching Kamala the Ugandan Giant walk into the ring. As I recall, we were arguing for the veracity of Kamala. My Dad, amused at the idea that Kamala was from Africa incredulously responded, "That nigger's from Alabama."

Heh. That's Dad for you. Anyway, I've been going back through old wrestling clips, as is my style, and I've actually been shocked at how much the whole business was built on stereotypes. More precisely, I'm shocked that, given that I grew up in a "conscious" house, how the stereotypes never bothered me.  In retrospect, I'm can't believe that Slick's entire career didn't spark an NAACP boycott--dig him here transforming the One Man Gang into "Akeem." My favorite, of course, was The Nation Of Domination--an NOI rip-off fronted by none other than The Rock. 

Truthfully, it doesn't bother me now and I see it as a kind of vaudeville. The key is that pro wrestling made gimmicks and employed stereotypes fairly equally. I'll leave to others to speak on how they felt. I think smacking Jimmy Snuka with a coconut was pretty ignorant, but the context of having, say, Roddy Piper as a hot-blooded Scottsman, Hillbilly Jim as an Appalachian hick, Nikita Koloff as "The Russian Nightmare," The Iron Sheik as the tool of Iranian tyrants, Hacksaw Jim Duggan as a redneck, and Brother Love as a Jimmy Swaggart made it hard to be angry. That said, I've always wondered how gay wrestling fans felt about Adrian Adonis, who went from a biker to "Adorable" Adrian Adonis, hosting a show called "The Flower Shop" and dressing Cowboy Bob Orton in a pink hat. Here's Adonis.

After the jump is the infamous "street-fight" match between Ron Simmons and Butch Reed vs Arn Aderson and Barry Windham. This is one of my favorites. But the scenes where they're beating each other with belts make me wince. I think that's on me, though. Arn Anderson is classic.

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Clued In

Alyssa meditates on the difficulty Brittany Murphy had in moving beyond Tai:

Murphy fared a bit better, but not without undergoing a jarring real-life makeover. After strong turns in Girl, Interrupted in 1999 and 8 Mile in 2002, she lost a significant amount of weight and tried to reinvent herself by starring in a string of mediocre but semi-successful romantic comedies. She had more success in voice work, with a long-running role on the animated television show King of the Hill. But her marriage made her a tabloid staple and her erratic behavior brought her negative attention even as it lost her acting work. Murphy's last notable movie role was a supporting part in 2005's Sin City.

The girls of my generation may have grown beyond their fleeting desire for knee-highs, and overalls are nowhere to be found in my wardrobe. But in a sense, Murphy never grew beyond her performance as Tai. To watch her in Clueless is to see her at her most joyful and at her funniest. The movie was so sunny that the song that plays over the opening credits, The Muffs' cover of "Kids In America," stopped playing before the lines "You know life is cruel / Life is never kind." But these lines now seem a sadly appropriate coda to Murphy's untimely death. Onscreen or off, she never quite surpassed the role that launched her career: the endearing and genuine newcomer who rises to the top simply by being herself.

Open Thread At Noon

It's yours...

Like Poisoned Butterflies Cont.

After reading Yusef Komanyakaa's piece, a reader does the math:

This is really helpful. Readers will note that I basically disregarded all the Australia imagery and took it to be about cocaine. Knowing Komunyakaa's intentions is helpful--but, for me personally, only to a point. A lot of what I'm saying is in the last post. Basically, I've come to believe in poetry--and I guess in all art--as a kind of partnership between the artist and the beholder. The "original meaning" is helpful, but, for me, neither necessary, and perhaps, not any more relevant than the meaning I invest in it.

Again, this comes out of basically spending my teen years listening to hip-hop. I'm going to write more about this later, but it's basically become apparent to me that much of what I took from hip-hop was a lot about what I heard, as opposed to what was being said. That's really OK, and it's not a knock--the artist has to make space for you to do that hearing. Moreover, I've come to feel that "what I heard" is actually what is important to me. There's something else--I became a poetry and hip-hop fan before the phrase "google it" had any meaning. Often you filled in the gaps because you had to, and artists--their influences, their intentions etc.--weren't as accessible as they are now.

The "I" in all this is really important. This is my way of understanding art and literature--I don't much care for establishing a "right way" to read a poem. The other part of the "I" is understanding that what I hear may not be what the artists is saying. For my money, I'm totally fine with that. For what it's worth, I'm only half concerned with facts of Koumanyakaa's King Billy, Rakim's Killer Ben, or Nas' Pappy Mason. I'm more concerned with how those words, used as they are, make me feel.

Yeah, About MGMT

So I tried to not to check out their album. Didn't want to be on the bandwagon. Yeah. That didn't work out so well. This joint is hawt.

The Thing About Clueless

With Brittany Murphy on my mind, I fired up Clueless around midnight.I couldn't sleep, and figured that by the time I got to the "Rolling With The Homies" scene I'd be out. No dice. But one thing that always strikes me about Clueless is the seamless way they integrated black characters.

This comes up a lot when we talk about film, and think most of it comes down to the quality of the movie. Poorly drawn movies tend to depend on poorly drawn characters. And poorly drawn black characters almost always descend into stereotype and cartoon. Not that I'm an expert on Teen Movies, but I can't really think of another one--pre-Clueless--that had African-American kids in strong supporting roles, looking like we look, which is to say, like human beings.

Here's Siskel & Ebert offering their take back in the day.

NFL Thread 2

I don't want non-Cowboy fans to feel left out..

NFL Thread

Call me shallow. I'm cheering for the Cowboys when I should be analyzing health care. Anyway, it looks like this is going to be great win, or a really agonizing defeat. Who knows. But I picked the Boys in Pick Em, even if I only put a point on 'em....I thought about putting 15.