Deep Thought

How many teams can Chris Bosh start for next year?

Landslide

As long as we're on the subject, here's a link to a New York Times piece criticizing the new design for the Barclay Center, the New Jersey Nets franchise's future home in Brooklyn. New York City has scrapped the original Frank Gehry design in favor of a proposal by corporate firm Ellerbe Becket.

H.L.

On the brink of their fifteenth title, the Los Angeles Lakers have finally realized their platonic form. During a playoffs in which Kobe Bryant has shot like an automaton from the perimeter, Pau Gasol proven he's more than a European softy and Lamar Odom overcome his (candy-driven?) inconsistency off the bench, the Lakers are playing like the deep, fluid team their roster says they are. By winning the first two at home, first with an epic 25-point smackdown, and then by surviving a volley of Rashard Lewis volley of threes, barring a collapse of epic proportions, the Lakers are poised to finish this season with an exclamation point.

And could it have been any other way? Sometimes, this is what playoff sports is about: watching the best team, often hated, dominate. Not every year gives us an upset, a feel-good story about unpretentious, underachieving coaches, emerging stars, teams that utilize a unique style-of-play. Instead, we have the best coach, the love-him-or-hate-him legend, the conventionally great squad, and guess what? They are probably going to walk from here to the championship.

This Laker team never reeked of invincibility, but at the same time I can't say I ever really thought they would lose a series. For every moment their toughness was questioned, they bounced back and played winning basketball. No player ever appeared a deadly deficiency on either end of the court, and when it came to close they had the man to do it. As a Laker hater it's never been fun to watch, but at this point I've come to terms with the meaning of their championship: the best team in basketball is about to win a title.

ONE DAY LOVER

New mix available for download. The mixing is real shoddy, especially as it goes on, but I think the flow is decent. I was going for a goofy yacht rock vibe but ended up with some interesting disco bits, and, of course, Animal Collective, which I probably only did to entice my friends to download it.



Playlist:

STEELY DAN - DO IT AGAIN
FLASH & THE PAN - MIDNIGHT MAN
BONEY M. - GOTTA GO HOME
MIDNIGHT STAR - MIDAS TOUCH
DOLLE JOLLE - BALEARIC INCARNATION (TODD TERJE'S EXTRA DOLL MIX)
THE PARADISE - IN LOVE WITH YOU
SUPERMAX - LOVEMACHINE
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE - SUMMERTIME CLOTHES
BEACH BOYS - KOKOMO

WHOA, HE SORTA DOES

I've been griping lately.

Gripe of the week: NCAA brackets. "Oh, poor me, my bracket is busted." Shut the fuck up. I don't care how poorly your Midwestern reg picks did in the first round, there are so few dudes who actually follow this stuff all season long, and you're just like everyone else who read a few websites you trust re: mid-major squads, has a gut-feeling about so-and-so, filled out your sheet/Yahoo and dropped a bill into your friend's hand hoping to rake like 10x that. The NCAA Tournament is great, don't get me wrong; I love college hoops way more than I do pro hoops -- squads gunning it all game, more composite adrenaline than any other sporting event, guys three years younger than me who like ten years older. It's an awesome spectacle. But talking to dudes you get the sense that the thing is like a two-week long Kentucky Derby, nobody gives a shit about good plotlines, conference affiliation, whatever, just their lame-ass bracket that, chances are, they "barely missed winning," because, duh, everyone barely misses winning, the teams all have numbers next to them so you know that, well, better at least put Louisville in the Elite 8. If you've bitched about your bracket to me, lemme take a page from Minor Threat and say that I DON'T WANNA HEAR IT.

MORE GRIPES TO COME.

MARINARA SAUCE

First of all, Twitter is lame. Blogger fer life. Actually, Twitter is kind of cool, just not my thing with . Second of all, there are some songs that summon this kind of sublime sad-happiness inside of me. It's a difficult feeling to describe; it kind of feels like spring, but saying goodbye to someone for a long time. Does that make any sense? One of these song's is De La Soul's "Eye Know."

BRAINTICKETS

Dudes... I want those Topsiders.

THE WHOLE WORLD IS A MASQUERADE

Doug Glanville, one of the most educated men to ever hit over .300 in a season, is a guest blogger for the New York Times whose musings I occasionally read during the season. Today, he offered a refreshingly empathetic take on the A-Rod steroid scandal. Glanville played with A-Rod for a season, actually shared the locker next to him, and he portrays A-Rod as a fundamentally solid dude who is also -- as any player in his magnitude of spotlight has the right to be -- monumentally self-conscious, constantly flummoxed by his inability to define the A-Rod narrative in the mind of the media and fans. A-Rod's a hard worker, but somewhere along the line he lost control of his image. Protests rage from the borderline homophobic -- lip gloss, really? -- to the frustrated boos Yankee fans shower down on him every time A-Rod strikes out with a runner in scoring position.

But we know this. We know everyone loves Jeter despite never being the stats machine that A-Rod has been. And the Grand Canyon-sized disconnect between A-Rod's numbers and his public image has always been his saving grace. But the baseball kingdom is a fantasyland where media and fans have surprisingly little room for nuance. The pressure to succeed in America encourages cheating in nearly every facet of society -- look at how many students take performance-enhancing drugs to succeed in school, or how many financial institutions we now know have cut corners in the name of success. Both of these things hurt people on all sizes of scales. But in athletic pursuits, we like our records as clean as possible, no asterisks allowed, despite the fact that they exist in a complete vacuum.

I have sympathy for A-Rod. Dude was not that much older than me when he began making hundreds of millions of dollars and was declared the greatest player in baseball. And he took drugs for two years of what will likely be something approaching a 20-year career. Forget his work ethic, and above all his natural talent: the toxicity of people's hatreds towards A-Rod lacked any real focus before this incident, and now it will conveniently and singularly center upon it.

JUNGLE ROCK

One thing about going to a liberal arts school with a reputation like mine is that people often showcase these eccentricities that they--correctly--assume nobody will really question. I do some goofy stuff myself, sure, but something happened yesterday that was so counfounding it just completely breached my tolerance barrier for weird campus behavior. I was on my way to a fencing class, just listening to music and minding my business. A tall-ish dude is walks out of his dorm and begins in my direction. Just as we reach the moment where we would otherwise pass by each other, he literally jumps up into the air right in front of me and sticks out his tongue. He lands, shoots this weird look into no particular direction and keeps on walking.

I was baffled by the act, and even kind of angry that someone would think it was OK to do that to someone they didn't know, so I took off my headphones and asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was trying to catch a snowflake on his tongue but missed. I didn't quite know what to say to that. He wasn't trying to weird me out, he just wanted a stupid snowflake, and didn't understand why I thought it was odd to do something like that to a stranger. All I could I do was get off a half-assed sarcastic response to the effect of, "Oh, I guess I had my headphones on so I didn't hear you warn me."