Admin: New Blog Name

Quick question - I'm thinking about changing the name of this blog from "Things I Type" to something else, but I can't think of a good name. Anyone have any suggestions? Your help is greatly appreciated.

Imperfect Strangers

Mentioning Halle Berry in the previous post got me thinking about her new movie, "Perfect Stranger", which then got me to thinking about strangers, which naturally transitioned into thinking about all the things I don't like about strangers. There's things I don't like, such as seeing someone who looks hot but then they turn around and have a terrible face, but I'm not trying to harp on things people can't control. Although, if you had a little more financial discipline you could save enough money to get some plastic surgery, uglyface. I digress.

People Who Shake Your Hand Way Too Hard
This one was courtesy of Rich, who puts it perfectly: "What are you trying to prove?" Seriously. The fact that you can crush my hand is proof of nothing other than that you're a douchebag. I don't find you any more intimidating just because you decided to make an otherwise forgettable moment awkward. Or, as Rich puts it, again perfectly, "I can still sleep with your wife."

People Who Stand Still On Airport Motorized Walkways

I'm not the first person to complain about this - I think Jerry Seinfeld has a bit about it where he says "you know, it's not a ride." Absolutely agreed - if you're not physically handicapped, you should be walking on the WALKway. If you're totally fine physically but are really that lazy, maybe you should pretend to have suffered a serious injury and get driven through the airport on the airport car/golfcart thing. But don't just block everyone's way standing there. People have flights to catch.

People Who Block Your Way After You Already Made Room For Them

Does this ever happen to you? You're walking one way, and someone else is walking towards you from the opposite end. You seem to be on the same path, so you step one step to the left or right so that the two of you won't bump into each other. But then, that person, well after you've shifted, shifts the SAME way. Sometimes it's as though the universe is telling me not to be polite to strangers, because they're probably idiots anyways.

People Who Visibly Look Like They Smell Bad

Rich said he holds his breath when a stranger like that passes him. I think I subconsciously cringe, raising my shoulders up ever so slightly while scrunching my face and leaning slightly away from the side this person is approaching from. Smelling bad is one thing, but it really only takes an absolute minimum of effort towards hygiene to LOOK like you don't smell bad. If you're not homeless, there's no excuse.

People Who Talk Too Loudly On Cellphone Headsets

First of all, people who talk too loudly on their cellphones are already annoying, but I've long since given up on that and instead fought back/worsened the problem more by also talking loudly on my cellphone. But the people with the Bluetooth headpieces need to calm the fuck down. You can't walk by me, appearing to not be on the phone, and then yell "Hey!" right in my face. That's just really confusing. I can't see that you have a earpiece on the other side of your head, I just think you're trying to talk to me. So cool it with that. Plus a lot of people walking around think you're some insane person talking to yourself, so it's for your own benefit to quiet down a little bit.

Impending Poor Decision

I saw the preview for "Good Luck, Chuck", and now I'm terribly afraid that I'm going to watch this movie. (Quick summary: Dane Cook somehow is a good luck charm: if women sleep with him, they will get married shortly thereafter to someone they love. Cook, on his own, falls in love with Jessica Alba, but can't sleep with her because then she'll fall in love with someone else and get married. So he has to balance his blossoming love with being unable to have sex, and hilarity ensues. He also has this fat "funnyman" friend, a role that was definitely written for Horatio Sanz - pretty sad that Horatio can't even land roles specifically written for him.) Watching this movie would be foolish for a lot of reasons, first and foremost that I would be supporting the career of Dane Cook, whose inexplicable popularity probably signals the impending downfall of the United States and potentially the entire universe.

I assume it's obvious why I'm afraid I'll watch this, but I'll say it anyways - Jessica Alba looks absurdly hot. That's not a good enough reason to watch it, but if anyone could convince me to make a bad movie decision, it's Jessica Alba. History has proven that I am prone to such mistakes (albeit rentals, not in theaters, thankfully) such as 2000's "Bedazzled", which featured Elizabeth Hurley while still at her peak, but also had the abysmally untalented and unappealing Brendan Fraser, whose continued existance as a mainstream actor shocks me to the core. Or "Valentine", starring Denise Richards and Katherine Heigl, lending their questionable dramatic talents to one of the stupidest scripts anyone ever greenlighted. I think I would have watched anything Denise Richards was in back then, so it's probably for the best that she's such a poor actress that she barely managed to be in any non-straight-to-DVD movies. I think one of the worst movies in this vein was "The Rich Man's Wife", an ill-fated 1996 movie that tested whether Halle Berry could singlehandedly carry a movie that would be bad even if it were made for Lifetime. I couldn't find the trailer, but someone, for reasons unknown, decided to post this clip on YouTube. Watch the clip - even more confusing than someone posting this is that 28 people added it to their favorites.

I won't watch "Good Luck, Chuck" in theaters, because 1) that's foolish and 2) no one would watch with me anyways, but I can already sense myself breaking down and renting it in January 2008. That will, in an indirect way, put more money in Dane Cook's pocket. It will be a sad day indeed.

Candy Rain

I was a convenience store today and was blown away by the variety of candy and mints that were being sold. I don't mean to suggest this is some kind of new phenomenon, but I never really thought about it before. How do all these product lines survive? I understand that the same company is making like 15 different chocolate bars, much as one cereal company has a lot of different cereals, but still - to maintain the separate production of a type of candy has substantial costs, but I never see or hear of anyone ever eating a lot of the things I see in stores. At least with every cereal I see frequently, I know people who eat (or as kids, used to eat) those cereals. Almost half the candies feel like they have no audience. One time, when I was maybe 8 years old, Rich gave me a SKOR bar, which I had never noticed before, but he claimed was good. I had it, it was in fact good, and I never had it again. I never saw anyone else eat one. I never even heard of anyone eating one. Yet there it is, sitting in the store, waiting patiently for no one to buy it.

When retired General Wesley Clark was running for president, I saw him on TV giving away Clark candy bars, and I thought it was weird that he would develop a candy bar just for his campaign, until someone told me that it was actually a commonly sold candy brand. I went to the store, and what do you know, a Clark bar. Never eaten one, never seen anyone else eat one. Then there's 100 Grand, which I've eaten myself because my dad had a buy one, get one free coupon for Halloween candy when I was a little kid, but I don't know of anyone else who eats it, save for the kids who came to our house that Halloween. I just don't comprehend how these obscure candies make money.

I also saw Certs in the store - have those become obsolete? I know they existed before Altoids became popular, but since Altoids burst onto the scene, I haven't seen anyone with Certs. There were a whole variety of newer Certs mints, which I've seen people buy, but they still sold like 5 flavors of the original roll Certs, which I don't think I've seen anyone with since like 1995. Maybe it's just so cheap to make candy and mints that even when the entire market passes it by, it's still better to continue producing. In which case, I demand a price drop - I rarely buy candy or mints anymore, so it won't save me much money, but it's the kids I'm looking out for. Children are our future.

Thoughts Before I Resume Trivialities

I've been kind of in a daze since the Virginia Tech shootings - I still remember Columbine vividly, and I was a little dazed then too. It's weird, violence happens everywhere literally all the time, but something about a school shooting touches an especially sensitive nerve for everyone, myself included. There's a strong desire to understand causes and come up with solutions that I don't always see in other walks of life. I was sure this would bring up the standard discussions of gun control, and video games, and the appeal of being notorious, and it did. It gets tiring to hear all the same old rhetoric in the wake of such a tragic event, but a part of me is glad that we're still, in some form, primitive or not, trying to stop such events, rather than just throwing up our hands and accepting it as a part of life. I'd rather not argue about gun control or video games, because those arguments never go anywhere, but more often than not, I think the people who get all riled up about that mean only the best.

In any case, my deepest sympathies go out to everyone affected by the shootings.

Trivial blog posts will resume very shortly, just a matter of putting pen to paper.

Making The Jump

Bill Simmons, absorbed in his Celtics universe, complained at length last week about the NBA lottery system, inadvertently reminding me of a point I been meaning to make for some time. One of his central complaints about the draft lottery is that, by allowing the worst-run franchises the best draft picks, dynastic teams can never develop, since franchises with bad records tend to have bad management - they're not capable of turning the high draft picks into a dynasty, and well-run franchises can't stockpile the talent they need to reach dynasty status.

Well, until recently, there actually was a way for a well-run franchise to continue to assemble top talent: draft high schoolers. The uncertainty of a high school player meant that a franchise with good scouting and coaching could find a gem below the top 10 picks in the draft, and eventually have themselves a superstar, without ever needing a top-4 pick. Witness Kobe Bryant, taken 13th in 1996, or Amare Stoudemire, taken 9th in 2002. A high-quality franchise like the Lakers or Suns could still build a dominant team with the right balance of scouting and coaching. Now of course, players cannot jump directly from high school to the NBA.

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I rarely see a well thought-out piece supporting high school players being allowed to jump to the pros. Either writers drone on and on about the evils of this, or someone like Scoop Jackson writes something along the lines of "yo you dun kno what it's like dog, being from nothing guys gots to get they money yo" without ever getting into the basketball itself, so allow me to try a reasoned argument. (As far as the law goes, I'm of the mind that says if you want to work, and an employer wants to employ you, provided that action doesn't impose significant externalities on others, it is unconstitutional to disallow such a transaction. The point is moot now since the league imposed a ban on high school players, so there are technically no employers who want to employ any of these high schoolers. But if you want my legal opinion, there it is. Spencer Haywood was right, Maurice Clarett was right, and those who disagree pretty much just want to make money off someone else's back or see their alma mater win, and I can't state it any more clearly than that.)

I'll start off by conceding the most obvious point - forcing players into college creates a built-in marketing machine for the NBA. It's more exciting to watch rookies you already know about. I completely concede that. The other most common point is that allowing the jump straight to the pros lowered the quality of college basketball. True, but I don't think the effect is as strong as some might have you believe. In this year's NCAA tournament, the only meaningful participants (your team has to have made the Sweet 16) who wouldn't have been there would be Brandan Wright and Greg Oden, who, for most of the tournament, was saddled with foul trouble and not all that fun to watch. TV ratings weren't down over the last 5 years, in fact, the March Madness contract is only getting fatter and fatter. If NCAA games got worse, they sure didn't seem to get less entertaining. If the traditional powers suffered because the elite crop of players was a little smaller, it only made college basketball that much more energized at the suddenly-more-competitive Gonzaga and Creighton and George Mason. Plus, the value of getting to see Kevin Durant play at Texas for a year has to be balanced against what we lost by having his NBA development held back by a year. If Kobe Bryant had gone to college for 3 years, you can bet he wouldn't have been ready by 1999 to be the fourth quarter leader of a championship team. By allowing great players to jump directly, we increase the total window they have to play at their absolute best, against the best competition in the world.

A widely held myth is that kids were destroying their lives, thinking they were NBA-caliber, and passing up on a chance to get an education chasing foolish NBA dreams. This is nothing more than paternalistic insanity. First of all, any reasonable person ought to have serious doubts about the strength of education for most elite Division I basketball players. Secondly, the notion that kids were wasting away on the NBA dream by declaring for the draft is patently false. I figured very few kids had declared and not gotten drafted, and thanks to some research by Michael McCann at the Sports Law Blog, now I know I'm right. Only three men - Taj McDavid, Ellis Richardson, and Tony Key - declared for the draft and have not made a decent living playing professional basketball. None were seriously recruited by D-I schools. Their declarations for the draft were akin to my dad declaring for the NBA draft. Even the notable busts, like Korleone Young, earned almost $300,000 in his one NBA season, and earns close to $100,000 playing abroad 8 months of the year. To believe that he could have earned millions had he gotten college training is to assume far more than can be proven, and I'm not in the business of worrying about the life prospects of guys who will earn $1 million by age 27, as Young likely will.

Of course, there is another point often made about Korleone Young: he was a pretty lousy NBA player. So the story goes, that even though Kobe Bryant is a star, most of the high school players are busts, and these draft busts were ruining the NBA. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, relative to draft position, high school players have been phenomenally successful as pros. Because teams are so selective in choosing someone to make the leap, the hit rate turned out to be tremendous. Since Shawn Kemp went pro in 1989, 9 high schoolers have been all-stars, but only 6 high schoolers have ever been drafted with a top-4 pick. I often hear that there's a few high school superstars, but after that the field is very diluted. Well, after the "few" superstars (Kobe, LeBron, Amare, T-Mac, KG), try these names on for size: Rashard Lewis, Jermaine O'Neal, Al Jefferson, Josh Smith, Monta Ellis, Andrew Bynum, Dwight Howard, JR Smith, Stephen Jackson, Al Harrington, Eddy Curry, Tyson Chandler. Some all-stars, some players who will likely become all-stars, some guys on the list of the 25 best players after the all-stars. Guys I didn't name have still had productive, long-term NBA careers, like DeShawn Stevenson, Darius Miles, DeSagana Diop and Kwame Brown. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't that many other names after what I've just listed.

A lot of these guys had rookie season struggles, but so do a lot of rookies who attended college. Most of these players were already making meaningful contributions by their second year in the league. The one guy who took a long time, Jermaine O'Neal, was likely hindered by playing behind another all-star in Portland, Rasheed Wallace. While rookie struggles are inevitable for young kids, I firmly believe that the overall quality of play is higher by allowing the direct jump, because it increases the number of prime years for elite players, and accelerates development by forcing them to play with tougher competition at an earlier age.

Everyone seems to think the NBA's minimum-age requirement is a smashing success. It may very well be psychologically for these kids - the extra year in college is a nice chance to grow up with a little less weight on the shoulders. But as a basketball fan (and I'm an NCAA fan too), if the phenoms want to, we really ought to let the truly elite players play against their only real competition, other professionals.

Spare Thoughts

I've noticed that no matter how full I am, or how recently I just ate, if there's guacamole in front of me, I will eat it. Even when it's mediocre guacamole, I still can't not eat it. I don't normally crave guacamole, but when it's just sitting there, it's virtually impossible not to eat. For me, guacamole is kind of like Rocky IV. Everyone agrees it is awesome, but you typically wouldn't plan your night around watching Rocky IV. But if it's on, man, it's pretty much impossible not to watch.

Steve alerted me to ESPN Classic showing reruns of American Gladiators at 7 pm on weekdays. ESPN Classic could be awesome but isn't - I guess they're afraid of showing anything remotely interesting 98% of the time in fear that it will divert ratings away from their more meaningful sister channels, so they show kickboxing and karate and poker reruns around the clock. Finally with American Gladiators, they've found something that isn't sports, but also doesn't suck. The show was great - I don't know why it wouldn't work today, I'm sure I'd still watch. I always enjoyed the comedy of jackasses like Nitro and Turbo, and the challenges were always cool, particularly the joust and the atlasphere, where they rolled around in those steel cages. They never implemented the "Fastest Steroid Injection" competition like I kept suggesting. I guess no one read all those letters I sent in.

What I've been reading: More Sex is Safer Sex, by Steven Landsburg. It's sort of a wannabe Freakonomics, with more absurd conclusions and less supporting hard data. It's also not as tightly written, but despite the flaws, it's still an interesting read. The title comes from an essay Landsburg published for Slate in 1996, arguing that increased sexual activity from sexual conservatives would create a safer environment. He implicitly contends that pro-abstinence campaigns are likely to resonate more strongly with sexual conservatives, thereby biasing the pool even more towards those who are infected. The more clean people in the pool, the less chance your random hookup poses any danger. He fleshes his thoughts out much better than that in the link, and even more so in his book. An interesting viewpoint, which is, within certain boundaries, quite clearly correct. Not everything else he throws against the wall works, but the book is engaging and clever.

What I've been listening to: I finally got around to buying Lupe Fiasco's debut album, Food & Liquor. It's been out for half a year already, but somehow I never got around to listening to it even though I loved the initial single "Kick, Push", a masterful skateboarding-coming-of-age story with a great hook. The rest of the album is consistently thoughtful and entertaining, and Lupe Fiasco exhibits the same electric flow as he had on Kanye West's "Touch The Sky" on nearly every track. It's my favorite rap album since Talib Kweli's "Quality" - I don't know many people who listen to this sort of stuff, but if you do, check out Lupe Fiasco's "Hurt Me Soul", "The Instrumental", or "Just Might Be OK". Best stuff I've heard in a while. Or listen to Avril and Fall Out Boy - I'm not here to judge. Really.