It's Not Fair to Do This, But I Will

I've been cruising around NBA sites looking for reactions on the Gasol trade to the Lakers and, despite what the working 11% of my brain tells me, I inevitably scroll down to the comments thread. That's where I found these three gems.



Now, in reverse order...

#11 - The fact that it's in all caps really completes the image of a wide-eyed child yelling this into an adult's face. When you add in the fact that he "dared" you to say Kobe isn't the best, and that "even Lebron admitted in on t.v.," I'm thinking you need to be THIS tall to use the internet.

#10 - Let's not be petty and pick and punctuation or spelling mistakes, but I love the hard stop --> new line, "I a Huge boston fan" where only "Huge" is capitalized. Like I always say, I don't understand stupid, but it amuses.

#9 - This just made me laugh. James lacks reading comprehension skills. For just a dollar a day, you can sponsor his reading tutor...

Reader's Note

It appears somehow the template on my blog has gone to shit. In the meantime, sterile, white and plain will have to do.

We apologize for any inconvenience and we are working diligently to rectify the issue.

- The Management

Costa Rica Summed and the Dark Times Ahead

Here's some of the one’s I’ve knocked out since the last update.
Went to go see Paul and Megan in San Francisco, which would count for "Visit Friend Outside of L.A. County", but that also counted for "Take a Road Trip of at Least 750 Miles."

Oh and about the part where I Go To Costa Rica…

Amy and I got stranded in the rain for our last 60 hours on the northern pacific coast in Costa Rica, and even though we were trapped inside our hotel we couldn’t muster the interest in keeping up this damn thing. Instead, we spent the last few days complaining about being surrounded by Americans for our first time there.

So as a form of weird summation, here’s a link if you want to see the whole huge collection of strange and silly photos from the trip.

As for where this space goes from here through the upcoming blue period (aka the time where I prepare for the February bar), I’ve decided to shift it into a part-time capacity. One project I’ve been putting off is sorting through the digital pile of music that’s been rotting on my hard drive unlistened for two years. I’ve been getting bored of the fifteen or so albums I've been playing in a heavy rotation, and I've got too many albums that I've downloaded, then never really sat down and thoroughly listened to. It's a stupid, gluttonous situation that I hope to remedy in the way college basketball and Mortal Kombat is resolved. A 64-team tournament bracket.

I've sorted through the music on my computer that I've added for the last two years and came up with 64 albums that I need to make a judgment call on. My idea is to put them in a single-elimination bracket style tournament in which I match each album up against another I've not listened to until a final hidden gem rises from the rest as the best album I've ignored for the last two years.

I've intentionally excluded albums that have already made my regular rotation from the tournament, because they would be heavy favorites in any bracket and undercut the purpose of this contest, which is to figure out what I don't hate. I'm thinking I'm going to have to come up with at least one good and bad comment for each album, a mention of any standout tracks, as well as a final verdict. The verdict should include not only which of the two albums moves on to the next round, but whether the album is to be kept or deleted. Towards the end, I imagine most of the chaff will have been culled, but you never know what a second or third listen through will do.

So here are the tentative rules:
- Each album must be listened to in its entirety
- Tracks can be skipped, but only after at least 50% of the track time has elapsed
- The artist's previous work cannot be considered in ruling on the present work
- In order to ensure that there have been no unfair pairings (beware of Russian judges) in any of the brackets, I will simply seed them in alphabetical order, based on album name
- As for whether an album should be judged on the totality of its work, or whether two excellent tracks and the rest as crap can carry the day over a nice, that will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis

Final bracket to be uploaded in the coming days.

My Bizarro Life: Guest-Starring My Imagined Creative Talents

Question: If you were to do something different with you life and time, money, and talent were of no consequence, what would you be?

JV's Answer: Comic Strip Humorist. If only I wasn't in the red for $100,000+. And could draw. By comic strip humorist, I mean less like Garfield and more like this stuff below. This is hands-down the most AMAZING intersection of lined paper, anthropomorphism, and basketball since... since I don't know. Since they did the storyboards for Space Jam, starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny.

The Competitive Style Guide for Basketball Players.

Style Guide for Gilbert Arenas.

Style Guide for Tim Duncan.

Linked from freedarko.blogspot.com. Note: if it's too small to read, click on it to magnify the image.

New Old Blog

It's hard enough to get a single blog going, much less two. While I work on making this a consistent place to post, I'm also reworking the navigation on the old blog, here. It's definitely light on content for now, but I'm trying to figure out if the whole type-to-navigate thing is neat enough to have on a page full-time, or if it's more trouble than it's worth. I'm starting to think the latter.