Anything related to a Dungeons and Dragons adventure makes me smile. My world has become full of responsibilities and stress so anytime the pleasant memories of spending an entire weekend rolling dice and aiming to get a plus two times three vorpal sword from some dragon’s hoard while sustaining myself with slices from a Pizza Hut “Big Foot” pizza are jogged, I get to go to my “happy place.” The comic below that I read back in January put me there. Enjoy.
Bart Scott said it best immediately after the Jets defeated the Patriots last week: anybody can be beat!
Below is one of the best post-game rants I have ever heard or seen and the fact that it comes from a Jet defender makes me smile. “Play like a Jet” indeed. Thankfully, ESPN itself has put it up online which means that I can post it below for you and be confident that it won’t be removed for copyright infringement reasons in the future, always a good thing in a video related post. Without further ado, here is the clip:
j-e-t-s…jets, Jets, JETS!
So far, so good this post season for my beloved American Football Jets. Over the last two weeks, the Jets picked up two wins against two very good teams, on the road both times. While the first win was a little savory, the second was oh so sweet. The Jets went into Foxboro and beat their archrival after a full week’s worth of serious trash talking – they actually backed up their strong words which is incredible in this age of bloviation. The team known as the Jets that I am watching today is quite different from the one I grew up watching and I very much like what I see.
Slowly but a surely a culture of success has taken over the team which is astonishing for someone who is always accustomed to waiting for the other shoe to drop when dealing with Gang Green. From the saying “Play like a Jet” to the sweeping arm motions that many of the players make after big plays, or when they run off the field after a win, to the fact that the team never seems to quit and that they somehow someway manage to make big plays when they are so desperately needed, it is evident that a new mindset has taken root which I still, almost two full seasons into watching this little plant grow, am having trouble grasping and accepting as the present reality.
That being said, I think Rex Ryan said it best when he sarcastically quipped in his post-game press conference, “Yeah, same old Jets. Going to the AFC Championship game two years in a row.” The part about the Patriots game that made me believe that these Jets are truly different is that they won powerfully and convincingly. They didn’t have to rely on trick plays, or to have gotten lucky at the right moment by say returning a fumble for a touchdown. No, they beat the Pats by beating them down with old fashion smash mouth football. They ran the ball all day long, they employed a punishing defense which while spotty during the year has turned it on the past month or so. Second year quarterback Mark “he’s stealthy good” Sanchez already has in his short career as many road playoff victories as anyone else who ever has played in the NFL and, it just keeps getting better, he has more road wins that Favre and Marino combined. He was better than two surefire first ballot Hall of Fame QBs two weeks in a row. Who are these guys?
I’m cautiously optimistic for this coming Sunday. It’s going to be a very tough game to win. I have experienced heartbreak in this title game twice before as they were up 10 points at the half in ’98 (when I watched the game in Simsbury, CT) and 11 points at the half in ’09 (when I watched the game in NYC) but lost both games. Now, I’m going for the Tri-state area trifecta by watching this game in NJ. Hopefully the third time is the charm. If its not though, hopefully this culture of winning will continue for a long, long time. I don’t want these Jets to become the late 80’s Browns, always close (The Drive! The Fumble!) but never going to the Super Bowl, or the early 90’s Bills, making and then losing 4 Super Bowls in a row. But, I guess there are worse things, like just being happy to even make the playoffs, like they were back in ’91 when Raul Alegre’s field goal as time expired tied the game and then his next field goal won the game for them. I said it last year that I hoped Ryan was building a foundation and this season it seems that he has done so. I’m looking forward to not only next week but many, many future weeks to come.
I read a fantastic short story by Steven Millhauser called “Getting Closer” in the January 3, 2011 edition of the New Yorker today that really hit me hard. I wasn’t expecting this story to affect me at all, especially not with the way the first few paragraphs flowed, which is one of the reasons I’m writing about it. The other reason is because the protagonist of the story, a 9 year old boy, tells dictates a short, simple and devastatingly powerful idea that really resonated with me because I often feel the same way that this kid does in the story. Basically, the story is about how his family has decided to go to a river for a day’s worth of fun and while he is oh so excited to lay in a tube and float around, he can’t seem to get into the river because to get into the river and the tube would mean that the day is now ending, it is no longer beginning, and he wants the joy of the anticipation of getting in the tube to linger as long as possible.
Everything has led up to this moment. No, wrong, he isn’t there yet. The moment’s just ahead of him. This is the time before the waiting stops and he crosses over into what he’s been waiting for.
I really don’t want to ruin this story – as I said, its short – only 3,000 words, but the idea it raises is one that I’ve struggled with most of my life. I often do not like to do things that I really, really want to do, or am really looking forward to doing, because once I’ve done them they are over and I am living in the past and no longer looking forward to the future. For instance, I will keep a book that I really want to read on my shelf for a year because once I read it, I no longer have the wonderful anticipatory joy of waiting to read it. This idea of stretching waiting time out is exactly what this kid echos – he doesn’t want to jump in the river because when he does, the countdown starts towards when he needs to get out of the river.
I’ve felt this way about all sorts of experiences, whether its trips (where the second I get on the airplane to go somewhere I’m already thinking about coming back), concerts (where the second I hear the first song I wonder how many songs will they play before this show ends), books (where the second I read the first page I wonder how it will end), movies, you name it. Basically anything I like I delay, because the anticipation of the event to me is almost if not as good as the event itself. Weird but true. That is what this story is about and I love it because I’ve never had these emotions that I feel put into words the way that Mr. Millhauser did. Well done sir.
I work with an amazingly interesting and intelligently creative bunch of individuals who from time to time, and that means virtually every single day, manages to send out a link to something new, different, fascinating, funny, odd, media related, data orientated or “other” and I never get to share them. So, in the spirit of sharing, I promise to do a better job at forwarding these nuggets along, especially since I don’t seem to have the energy to voice my own opinions as much as I used to.
For instance, check out In Bb 2.0 – a collaborative music / spoken word project that uses the simple beauty of code and YouTube videos to present something awfully compelling. The creators saw that YouTube doesn’t stop the user from running more than one video at a time and were curious to see if there was a musical way to explore that concept. There is, and its pretty cool: http://www.inbflat.net.
…sink ships. That and a few other mottos about keeping your mouth shut when it comes to things related to our country were not only en vogue but were actively advertised during the World Wars:
To put it another way, as Michael said to Fredo in “The Godfather”:
Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.
Well, the bad people at WikiLeaks took advantage of one soldier’s hatred towards America/mischievousness/yearning to make a big difference in the world in whatever – whether positive or destructive – way possible, or maybe he took advantage of the WikiLeaks organization to get his name out there (now that it is I hope he has fun with the fan mail he’ll get in prison as he serves a mega long court martial sentence), but regardless of the order in which who approached who, a treasure trove of classified information was obtained and shared publicly with the world. This act is taking sides against the family to the nth degree. For shame!
While I get the macro level argument for having a state of full transparency in the world, I do strongly believe in the need for secrecy when it comes to statecraft, and believe in the opaqueness of communication and mission, and I honestly think that releasing all of this information was a bad move. I’m all for transparency, but sometimes things are best left in private and sometimes the best things ever said aren’t said. That being said, I’m not going to pass up on this story just because I find it distasteful. I do think that America’s interests were harmed, though I’m not specifically sure how. I’ll leave that up to the experts to quantify. Even if he/they truly wanted to make a statement, they could have release much less than the 250,000 documents that they published.
Considering that the info is out there though, I’m not going to just avoid it. Here in no particular order is the “top 10” things we learned (he following content was taken from Zach Roth over at Yahoo News):
But what did we actually learn? Here are 10 key revelations from the cables:
1. Many Middle Eastern nations are far more concerned about Iran’s nuclear program than they’ve publicly admitted. According to one cable, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly asked the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake” — meaning, it appears, to bomb Iran’s nuclear program. Leaders of Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern nations expressed similar views.
2. The U.S. ambassador to Seoul told Washington in February that the right business deals might get China to acquiesce to a reunified Korea, if the newly unified power were allied with the United States. American and South Korean officials have discussed such a reunification in the event that North Korea collapses under the weight of its economic and political problems.
3. The Obama administration offered sweeteners to try to get other countries to take Guantanamo detainees, as part of its (as yet unsuccessful) effort to close the prison. Slovenia, for instance, was offered a meeting with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions.
4. Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud took $52 million in cash when he visited the United Arab Emirates last year, according to one cable. The Afghan government has been plagued by allegations of corruption. Massoud has denied taking the money out of the country.
5. The United States has been working to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani nuclear reactor, out of concern that it could be used to build an illicit nuclear device. The effort, which began in 2007, continues.
6. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered diplomats to assemble information on their foreign counterparts. Documents in the WikiLeaks cache also indicate that Clinton may have asked diplomats to gather intelligence on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s plans for Iran, and information on Sudan (including Darfur), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iran and North Korea.
7. The State Department labeled Qatar the worst country in the region for counterterrorism efforts. The country’s security services were “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” according to one cable.
8. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are tighter than was previously known. Putin has given the high-living Berlusconi “lavish gifts” and lucrative energy contracts, and Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe, according to one cable.
9. Hezbollah continues to enjoy the weapons patronage of Syria. A week after Syrian president Bashar Assad promised the United States he wouldn’t send “new” arms to the Lebanese militant group, the United States said it had information that Syria was continuing to provide the group with increasingly sophisticated weapons.
10. Some cables reveal decidedly less than diplomatic opinions of foreign leaders. Putin is said to be an “alpha-dog” and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to be “driven by paranoia.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel “avoids risk and is rarely creative.” Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi travels with a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse.
The cables were obtained, via WikiLeaks, by the New York Times, the Guardian of Britain, Der Spiegel of Germany, Le Monde of France and El Pais of Spain.
Two months ago I moved from NYC to the burbs…and have been tired ever since.
I sleep three times a day now: at night, on my way into NYC and my way home from NYC. The dream, no pun intended, of reading a book on the way in and watching a DVD on the way home has been retired for now because I’m just too tired to even try to do accomplish it. Having two kids under three years of age will do that to you I guess and if you add a stressful job into the mix, you definitely have a great recipe for a lack of posting, which is exactly what has happened over the past few weeks / months.
I’m not happy about this development. It makes me sad. That being said, I’ve been able to be reunited with all of my writings now from the past and seeing the shear volume of that discourse makes me feel guilty about now posting more.
On the one hand, I want to stay relevant and out there. So maybe I should post 140 characters or less with a link to something else a la Twitter on this blog. On the other hand, that isn’t what this blog is about and I refuse to do that. When I migrated it from Movable Type to WordPress, I had to reformat a lot of posts and realized how many of my posts were simply “Go look at this cool thing!” posts which didn’t hold up over time – the links are gone from YouTube and without context, even I, the one who wrote the post, didn’t know what was truly going on which was so very discouraging. That is because my intention for this site is that one day, I want for someone to be able to look at this blog as something of substance, an ironic gesture considering that it only exists as zeros and ones powered by power.
Anyway, I have a whole folder just full of things to post. In both my personal and work email accounts I’ve created a folder called “Blog Worthy” and there are tons of posts just waiting for me to address. I promise to you Hopefully Constant Reader that you’ll get a smorgasbord of them soon!
Many years ago when I first started this blog I wrote about the idea of Being Present thinking that, “The importance of being present is beyond belief for life is brief and a day can be spent so easily” and I wondered, “Is it possible to be present with so much going on at once?” I wrote that post back before my life became the much more complex jumble of tasks, activities, wants and needs that it currently is so now, more than ever, I wonder about one’s ability to be and more importantly stay present.
My children get older each day and so do I, but while I have calcified to a degree they are rapidly changing. I’m the same from day to the next but they are different. As I was concentrating on how fractured I am right now, and how I have not been able to diligently put my thoughts down on what it means to be a father, to watch a little baby grow into a little person, one of my favorite sayings, one that I used to write into all of my school notebooks, popped into mind. I have never shared it on this blog and thought “if not now, when?” I’m going to try to keep it top of mind for the rest of the week. We’ll see if that makes a difference in how present I can be. Enjoy.
Yesterday is ashes.
Tomorrow is wood.
Only today the fire burns brightly.
Proverb via the Eskimos
If you are in need of a laugh, check out this interview with a very drunk James Brown:
This is the second time I’ve posted a very funny drunk black man on my blog – the first being Tracy Morgan. I need to post some very drunk white, latino and asian men now for proper balance. Happy Friday!
Via Josh
I love maps. I have a map of NYC that was made for runners (it lists all of the bathroom available in Manhattan based on availability and cleanliness). I have maps of the NYC and London underground systems. And so on, and so forth…
Today I was sent a link to some maps that Yanko Tsvetkov, a Bulgarian living in Great Britain, created. the first was done in 2009 in the midst of the energy dispute between Russia and the Ukraine. Russia was labeled “Paranoid Oil Empire”, the Ukraine “Gas Stealers”, and the E.U. as “Union of Subsidized Farmers”. Switzerland was simply “Bank”.
Click on the thumbnails below to check them out and if you like, check out Yanko’s site. Enjoy!
Via Ann