More About Hornby

Just a little bit more about Nick Hornby. One thing that I really like about his writing is that he's not afraid to go on tangents, inserting parenthetical thoughts that come along to make his points. The main character in High Fidelity did this and Hornby wrote that way about himself in Fever Pitch. I appreciated that because it's something that I do and it was good to know that I'm not totally alone in it.

I'm really bad about this. I'll jump all over in a conversation sometimes and The Muse will make me explain how I got from Point A to Point B. I was talking to my aunt The Spunky Nurse one time and made one of these Knievelesque leaps of conversational logic (sometimes they crash and burn, just like Evel). The Spunky Nurse told me that that kind of thing was a sign of schizophrenia. It was something that I had to work on when I first started in law. In law school, I was always wanting to have three footnotes on every page to put in all of the things that I found interesting. Needless to say, this doesn't work very well. People, clients and judges especially, want to get to the point in law and business. I had to work on my writing to get past this. When I'm reading something for pleasure, though, I like writing that takes a few detours. (Simon Winchester is good for this, too. He has lots of good footnotes in his books. He has a new one coming out about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, to which I am quite looking forward.)

Is this a guy thing? Do guys' minds wander more than women's? Who knows? Just read yourself some Nick Hornby. He's quite good.

Being A Corporation

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively being a very good couple, a "corporation," as The Muse's grandpa apparently once said about us. In talking about how a couple's upsides and downsides should fit together, the post talked about how The Muse and I have similar views about movies and that's actually how we first bonded.

In thinking about it, I realized that maybe wasn't the best example. If people could be a really good couple just based on their tastes in movies, then maybe Siskel and Ebert would have made a nice couple. There's a picture for you. The Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker of movies as a couple. I thus realized that I needed a better example. Luckily, I thought of one: our family's trip to Hawaii last spring. That was a pretty good example of The Muse and I making each other better, I think.

I started talking about going sometime around this time last year, I guess. The Muse said that would be great, if I would organize it. Now this kind of thing calls on two things that I am decent at: (1) doing research until the subject is ground down into a very fine dust; and (2) bugging people I don't know to find out about stuff. So I did a bunch of research about the resorts where we could go, decided that I didn't really like those options, put an ad on Craig's List for a condo when we wanted to go, got a couple of responses, noticed that they linked to a Web site where lots of people offer their condos, found a condo that looked good at the time and roughly the price we wanted, called the owner to find out about the beaches around the condo and what stuff was in the condo, got the contract to rent the condo and made the deposits and stuff. I went through a similar process with airline flights and ended up booking us on an airline that we had never heard of that flew direct from Oakland to Maui. All of that worked out pretty well.

So, then we get to Maui and it's kind of rainy. Apparently, we caught the very tail end of a storm. We decided to go to the beach the next day because, well, it's Maui and that's why you're there. As soon as we get out on to the beach, all I can see is what looked to me like big waves breaking on the beach. This frightens me, triggering my whole-honed instinct to worry about the kids. We went into the ocean and I just wanted to hold on to the kids as tightly as I could. I couldn't see what The Muse saw, which was that, if you just went out beyond where the waves were breaking, there were nice swells on which you could just float. After some effort, The Muse convinced me to take the kids out there. And, after that, things were great. The adults had fun, the kids had fun. It was good. It took me a while to get used to looking at swells that were higher than my head and realizing that they weren't going to break on top of me, but The Muse got that. She's much better at stuff like that than me.

The trip to Hawaii therefore seems like a pretty good example of how couples can be corporations. You make each other better, taking turns balancing your strengths and weaknesses. OK, there's a better example. Sorry about that lame one a couple of days ago.

Fever Pitch

A couple of years ago, I read an article that had to do with Nick Hornby, the English author. It might have been a review of the movie High Fidelity, which was based on his book. (We saw the movie. John Cusack starred in it and he's one of The Muse's favorites. It also had Lisa Bonet in what was apparently her one and only role between her departure from A Different World and the present. It was pretty good, but could have been a lot better. I'd give it a Movie+.) In this thing that I read, it referred to Hornby's book Fever Pitch and said that it was the best book about being a rabid sports fan ever. Well, being a pretty rabid sports fan, I knew that I had to read Fever Pitch at some point.

Thus began some mild weirdness in which I never quite found Fever Pitch. I could've just bought it on Amazon, I guess, but, for some reason, I got it in my head that I needed to find it in a used book store. It was one of those brainlocks that everyone has, I guess, maybe me more than others. It wasn't as bad as the times that I set a breadbasket on fire in a microwave or that I forgot to check whether the cap was on the A1 sauce before I shook it and thus wrecked my Los Angeles Dodgers 1981 World Champions shirt. (Damn it!)

I really liked Fever Pitch. It's about Nick Hornby's totally obsessive and dysfunctional relationship with the English soccer (football, in the book, of course) team Arsenal and, somewhat less pressingly, soccer in general. It took me a while to get used to, but basically 30%-35% of the verbiage in the book is totally incomprehensible to someone who doesn't know English soccer teams. I know a little bit about that subject, like how English soccer has different divisions, so if your team sucks, they'll get booted out of the top division and won't have any chance to win the league championship until they win their way back into the top division (according to the book, this process is called "promotion" and "relegation"). It would be like if the Kings wouldn't have had any chance to get into the NBA playoffs the first couple of years that they were good because they sucked so bad for the previous 15 years. I have heard of a few of the English soccer teams like Arsenal and Manchester United, but I sure didn't know that Liverpool was a big successful team. But a lot of the book's discussion of soccer was just lost on me.

This turned about to be just fine, however, because the book isn't about soccer, but rather about Hornby's obsession with it. You just have to let the descriptions of soccer wash over you as expressions of an obsessive to get to his descriptions of how soccer affected him. It's basically what I think The Muse does when I get started talking about how the Kings aren't screening for Peja well enough for him to get open shots or how Kevin Garnett has never set a legal screen on a pick-and-roll in his life. (He hasn't! He moves into the chasing defender every freakin' time and he never gets called for it. It's an offensive foul! Of course, he isn't yet as bad as Karl "Hip Check" Malone.)

And Hornby's discussion of soccer's effect on him is the best description of being a sports fan that I have ever read. It gets the highs and lows just right.

On the high side, he talks about how, in 1989, his team Arsenal was leading the championship standings ahead of Liverpool three games before the end of the season and basically needed to win one of the next two to clinch before they played Liverpool in the last game at Liverpool. If Arsenal won, it would be the first time in 18 years that they won the championship. Of course, they lost the next two games and, due to the league's bizarre rules (apparently, the standings are determined by points that are keyed not just to games won and lost, but also to goals scored or winning/losing margins or something -- there are no playoffs), they needed to beat Liverpool in Liverpool by at least two goals. Arsenal was up by one goal -- close, but not enough, as Papa used to say, "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades" --- with less than a minute to play when they got a breakaway and scored the goal that they needed. Hornby describes this as basically an out-of-body experience that he barely remembers and, when the game ended, he went running down the street to buy the first bottle of champagne he could find with his arms stretched out like "a little boy playing aeroplanes."

I have had this kind of experience, specifically on October 15, 1988, when Kirk Gibson, in his only World Series at-bat that year due to injuries in both legs, hit a hanging slider from Dennis Eckersley into Dodger Stadium's right-field pavillion on a 3-2 count with 2 out in the bottom of the 9th with Mike Davis on 2nd as the tying run with the Dodgers down 4-3 in Game 1 of the World Series. I was watching in my dorm room and, where Jose Canseco turned his back to watch the ball go into the stands among the absolutely delirious Dodgers fans, I went running into the dorm hallway, jumping, jumping high enough that I distinctly remember pushing one of the foamy ceiling panels out of place. This was one of the better moments of my life. There was no way the Dodgers should have beaten the Mets to get into the World Series (Game 4 of that NLCS -- Mike Scioscia hit a home run off Doc Gooden in the 9th to tie the game when, if the Mets had won they would have been up 3-1, Gibson hit a home run in the top of the 12th that I called before it happened, I remember distinctly sitting in my friend Jayson's dorm room, saying Gibson might hit a home run and then the whole room looking at me when Gibson hit it, Jesse Orosco walking guys in the bottom of the 12th and Tommy Lasorda coming out to yell at him, Al Michaels saying something like "I don't know if I believe this, but it looks like Orel Hershiser is warming up in the bullpen," then Hershiser coming into save the game with the bases loaded, the winning run on 2nd, in the bottom of the 11th, with my legs tapping involuntarily -- remains the greatest baseball game that I have ever seen), there was no way the Dodgers could beat the A's, there was no way Eckersley should have walked Davis with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th (Eckersley had walked, I think, 4 guys that year), there was no way that Gibson should be able to hit with his two bad legs, there was no way that Gibson was going to beat a throw to 1st if he hit it anywhere other than the stands, there was no way that Eckersley would throw Gibson anything other than a fastball when Gibson was barely able to get around on his fastball in the previous 8 pitches. Yet, it all happened, Gibson hit it out and the Dodgers won the World Series. I keep a little plastic figurine of Kirk Gibson in my office. I figure that the Dodgers' World Series dry spell since 1988 is mostly the karmic toll to be paid for Gibson's home run.

I know others have had this experience. Two of my law partners are fully-committed Red Sox fans. After Aaron Boone hit the home run for the Yankees that beat the Red Sox in the ALCS in 2003, I attended a meeting with one of my partners when an unfortunate junior associate from another firm asked him what he thought of the ALCS and my partner said, "It's enough to make you question your way of life." He wasn't kidding. As low as they were in 2003, my partners were about 100 times higher in 2004, when not only did the Red Sox win the World Series, but they came back from 3-0 down to the Yankees to get to the World Series, thus making the Yankees the biggest chokers in the history of professional sports. One of my partners has said that he categorizes years as "B.W.S." and "A.W.S.", as in "Before World Series" and "After World Series," with this year being 1 A.W.S.

Hornby gets all of this. He describes it. It is good to see in print, to know that others feel about sports like this, even if it is probably not very healthy.

Hornby also accrately describes the lows, how you can't believe that your team has come up with this particular way to injure you. He describes how he attended a game for the championship of some minor cup (apparently, English soccer works something like college basketball would work without the NCAA tournament: there are lots of teams in different divisions or leagues, they kind of get to pick their own schedule, they can play in different tournaments if they want) where Arsenal was playing a team from a lower division. Arsenal easily should have won, but lost. This marked Hornby forever.

Again, I have had similar experiences. I distinctly remember watching Game 5 of the 1985 NLCS. The Dodgers and the Cardinals were tied in games 2-2 and tied going into the bottom of the 9th. Ozzie Smith came up for the Cardinals. Smith was maybe the greatest defensive shortstop ever. (He once dove for a ball up the middle, had the ball take a funny hop in the air, adjusted while falling, caught the ball in his bare hand, got up on his knees and threw the runner out at first. I saw him go on the other side of 2nd, catch the ball in his mitt and, on the dead run, throw the ball around his back to the second baseman to start a double play.) He was, however, at best a banjo hitter. He was a switchhitter. The Dodgers' pitcher, Tom Niedenfuer, was right-handed, so Smith came up to hit left-handed. NBC runs the following graphic as Smith comes up: "Ozzie Smith has hit only one home run left-handed in his career." Needless to say, Smith hits a home run to put the Cardinals up 3-2. A couple of days later, Niedenfuer gives up a home run to Jack Clark in the 9th in LA and the Cardinals go to the World Series.

Of course, this was just a prelude to pain inflicted by the Kings' 2002 loss to the Lakers in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals. At ARCO, the best home arena in the NBA. In overtime. When the Kings scored first and had a chance to go up five on a 3 that Doug Christie front-rimmed. After Peja air-balled a 3 with about 10 seconds left in regulation that would have won it. After the Kings gagged up a 20-point lead after the 1st quarter of Game 4 (the Lakers' crowd booed the Lakers off the court at the end of that quarter) and lost on Robert Horry's shot. After Mike Bibby beat the Lakers on a jumper with 8 seconds left in Game 5 (I was there -- it was pandemonium at ARCO). After the refs screwed the Kings in Game 6 (hey, it's not an offensive foul for Kobe throw an elbow into Bibby's face to free himself up on an in-bounds play) and they still only lost by 4. It was awful. It was the worst sports pain that I have ever suffered. I was at my parents' house that weekend with The Mermaid and had to get in the car immediately after the game to drive home. Thank God for The Mermaid. She jabbered at and with me on the way home and probably kept me from driving off the road. One of my friends tells his young children the story of Game 7 as a cautionary fable. (I don't quite know what the moral is -- make your free throws?) It wasn't as bad as Bill Buckner is for Red Sox fans or maybe Felix Rodriguez and Scott Spezio is for Giants fans, but it's close.

Hornby gets all of this. If you're a sports fan, take a look at the book. You will have moments of self-realization. Hornby, however, is just totally off his nut to say that soccer is the best game because goals are so rare that they're precious and you remember every one. Cliff Clavin once found a potato that looked like Richard Nixon and no one thought that was so great. Webbed toes are pretty rare, but no one seems to be clamoring to see my feet. Thankfully.

This (OK, Last) Weekend III

One more thing about this (OK, last) weekend.

The wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner were in the Bay Area last Thursday night. The Muse, Enthusio and The Mermaid needed to be at the rehearsal at 6 p.m. in the Bay Area. They needed to leave Carmel-by-the-Causeway (thanks, Bob Dunning) about 2:30 to get everything done that they needed to do in order to get to the rehearsal on time. I wanted to go then, but work had other ideas, so I had to go later. (As they tell you your first year of law school, "The law is a jealous mistress.") I personally left Carmel-by-the-Causeway at about 6 p.m.

Just west of Carmel-by-the-Causeway on the freeway, I hit something in the road. Didn't see it. Usually, you can see things like torn-up tires and pieces of wood and parts of couches in the road and avoid them. I try really hard. I didn't anything this time and had the most God-awful thump on El Machino. I pulled off the road at the next exit to check my tires, but didn't see anything. (It did beat up the front spoiler. Hello, weeks of dealing with insurance, body shops and rental-car agencies. At least it wasn't my fault this time -- I don't want to hear any BS about my driving, Intenseus and Guitar Guy.) So I drove on down to the rehearsal dinner, about an hour away by freeway.

Fast forward to the night after the wedding reception. The Muse pulls up in El Machino and tells me, with one of the most troubled faces I've ever seen her have, and says, "There's something really wrong with the car. It's driving funny and smells like rubber." This is 10:30 p.m., so I go outside to see what I can see in the dark. Even in the dark, it's obvious immediately that the right front tire is flat as a delayed reaction to The Thump. I feel relatively relieved at that moment. It's just a flat.

I call AAA to come put the spare on the next day. (No, I can put a spare on. I just figured that this is El Machino, I haven't changed a tire on it before and we pay for AAA, so what the hell.) So the AAA guy pulls the flat tire off. Oh my god, was it a mess.

Basically, the cords were ripped out through the rubber all over the inner side of the tire. There were large gashes that apparently had taken a while to split all the way open to let the air out of the tire. It was bad, bad, bad. The Thump must have torn it up at least some in ways that I couldn't see on Thursday. Yikes.

At that moment, I am thinking, "Oh . . . my . . . god, are we lucky." I drove on that thing for an hour. The Muse drove on it some. She drove Ms. Lively around on it on her wedding day. Thank you, thank you, thank you for not letting it blow up. It was just a good moment to reflect and be thankful for what we have.

So what is at least one moral to this story? Really try not to run into things on the freeway. It's bad.

This (OK, Last) Weekend II

I meant to post some more about last weekend before this weekend, but things got away from me. Sorry about that.

OK, so where we left off with last weekend was with Mr. Dry Wit's and Ms. Lively's wedding. (They're now on their honeymoon. Party on, Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively!) In addition to Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively, this was a big event for Enthusio and The Mermaid.

Enthusio got to be in a wedding for the first time. He was the ringbearer. The Mermaid has been a flower girl before and Enthusio occasionally asked why he hadn't been in a wedding, so it was very nice that he got to be the ringbearer. Because Enthusio loves Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively so much, we thought about asking them if Enthusio could be in the wedding, but they asked, so, in the words of Ren and Stimpy, it was happy, happy, joy, joy. Enthusio got to wear a tux, which he enjoyed a lot. (It was big fun getting him measured. He didn't squirm or anything.) Because of Mr. Dry Wit's shoe preferences, Enthusio got to get and wear black Chuck Taylors, which he enjoyed a lot. Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively gave him an wedding favor engraved with his name and the details of the wedding, which he enjoyed a lot. He got to eat meatballs and tri-tip (or, as Enthusio puts it, "Um, meeaat") and chocolate cake, which he enjoyed a lot. It was pretty much a big party for Enthusio.

The best part about Enthusio's experience, at least for me, was his dancing. He danced very enthusiastically at the reception. I'm talking VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY. He basically was dancing around stamping his feet as fast as he possibly could while turning his hands and arms around really fast too and, then, stopping completely in a frozen pose at what appeared to be almost totally random intervals. Besides being another example of the Miniature Adult Fallacy (kids are not miniature adults, they are a strange, more or less indecipherable species of their own), it was just darn enjoyable. I tried to do it a little bit with him and nearly had a heart attack and ended up making my hurt ankle sore for about three days.

This (OK, last) weekend also was pretty good for The Mermaid. Because she was a groomsmaid (a bridesmaid on the groom's side), The Muse was tied up with various wedding stuff the day before the wedding and from about 9 a.m. on the wedding day until the wedding. This meant that The Mermaid, Enthusio and I spent a lot of time together during those times. They were really good, going above and beyond the call in the goodness category. They had pretty much the statistically probable level of annoying behavior brought on by boredom (ooh, The Mermaid just loved going to Men's Wearhouse while Enthusio and I tried on our tuxedoes), but no more and bounced back from it really well. On the wedding day itself, I basically had no activities planned to entertain them from 9 a.m. until 1:30, so we drove around seeing relatives and they didn't destroy anything at anyone's house! It was great. They were great. I was proud of them.

Specifically in relation to The Mermaid, the wedding brought out something that I had never seen in her before. Before the wedding party showed up, I was dancing with her and with Enthusio and she really seemed to enjoy dancing. That was really nice. Even better was when everyone was dancing. This of course involved a big crowd with really loud music. Now, because The Mermaid is high-functioning autistic, she generally hates big crowds and loud music. She needs -- pretty much, physically, I think -- to go be in a quieter area. This time, however, when she was dancing just like everyone else, she just had this big beatific smile going. I would spin her around and she would just smile. It was great.

Later, in the evening, as The Muse and I expected, The Mermaid just got really tired and pretty much lost it. I had a real mix of emotions going. I wanted to stay, so I was kind of mad. I knew that The Mermaid was just feeling what she was feeling and that it was totally to be expected, so I wanted to do what I could to help her. I felt bad about being kind of mad about what was happening. But, basically, the night just ended a little earlier than I wanted. Ultimately, not a big deal. Certainly not enough to take the shine off of Enthusio's crazy dancing and The Mermaid's big smiles.

This Weekend I

This was a big weekend in a lot of ways. Most importantly, the Muse's brother Mr. Dry Wit married Ms. Lively on Saturday. It was a seriously great wedding for a seriously great couple.

There's a really bad line from a movie where one member of a couple says to the other member, "You complete me." (I'm remembering that it was from Jerry Maguire because it would be a nice mate for "You had me at hello." For someone who wrote stuff as good as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Singles, Cameron Crowe had some serious clunkers in Jerry Maguire.) While it's a bad line, there's some real truth to it. It seems like someone who you want to marry should complete parts of you, maybe in ways that you didn't know needed completing. That's how the Muse is for me, at least.

I'll give you an example. The first time that the Muse and I ever really had a conversation by ourselves, it was watching this really atrocious movie The Wraith late at night in our dorm. We got started talking about that was a real "flick," while better movies should get called something else like "movie" or "film." I always knew that I really liked movies and to think about movies, but I don't know that I had ever met someone who was on the same wavelength on that before I met the Muse. We still use the flick-movie-film rating system to rate movies. (For example: (1) The Wraith would be a "flick" because it blew; (2) Jerry Maguire would be a "flick +" because it pretty much blew; (3) a movie we watched recently, In Good Company, would be a "movie" because it had good acting and good actors, but the plot wasn't great and Marg Helgenberger was totally wasted (in that she had nothing to do, not that she was drunk); (4) Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King would be a "film-" because it was pretty great, but there was an awful lot of incomprehensible Tolkeinese, rock-flinging and Nazguel-flying that could have been cut; (5) There's Something About Mary would be a "film" because it was the funniest movie of the last 15 years; and (6) Star Wars would be a "film+" because it has inspired a generation of American men with its brilliance.) Apparently, The Muse's grandpa thought The Muse and I fit together pretty well. One time when the Muse and I were at her parents' house several months before we got married, after we left, the Muse's grandpa told her mom, "That [Muse] and [Webbed Toe], they're a corporation."

Anyway, I get the right kind of vibe from Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively. It's the same vibe I get from my mom and dad (married 38 years), The Muse's mom and dad (married 38 years) and Ms. Lively's mom and dad (also married 38 years, I think). (1967 was a fine year for California marriages, apparently. Nice bouquet, they age well.) Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively mesh together very well. They seem to make each other better. Before Ms. Lively came around, I don't know if I would have believed you if you had told me that Mr. Dry Wit would shake a tailfeather like he was shakin' it. (Of course, I didn't go to college or Germany with him either.) When he was a young teen, he did do a stellar Dwarf from Twin Peaks dance and a nice Ickey Shuffle, but, dude, he was bustin' moves Saturday. Thanks for bringing that out, Ms. Lively.

So, biggest congratulations to Mr. Dry Wit and Ms. Lively. They're a corporation.

Shareef and Petrie

Now it's time for the post about the Kings getting Shareef Abdur-Rahim.

This is a great pick-up. Leaving aside the fact that the Kings got him for what passes as a bargain in the NBA -- $5 million a year for 5 years -- he should really fit nicely with the Kings. One thing that the Kings were just blatantly missing last year was any sort of scoring threat inside. Vlade's body was falling apart in 2003-04, but he could still score a little inside with his bag of up-and-unders and little hooks. Webber seemed to have given up on the idea of being an inside player after he got back from his injury -- I guess not being able to jump had something to do with that -- and he always seemed to like playing pretty on the outside better anyway. For some reason that escapes me, while Brad Miller has many, many great skills, he seems to have no ability to put the ball in the hole from five feet with his back to the basket. (Please, Brad, learn a jump hook.) Finally, once Vlade left, Webber was traded and the annual plague of injury locusts descended on the Kings in the form of Miller's freak broken leg, they were reduced to a team basically running around looking for open jump shots. Not surprisingly, they couldn't get back into sync in the playoffs when they are started to approach health.

Shareef seems like a big help on this. He can actually score when he's close to the basket. This is nothing but good. In addition, while Shareef isn't known as a great passer and the Kings' offense requires that their big men pass, Shareef's personality seems to be such that he probably would be cool with the idea of getting four or five assists a game. He's also supposed to be a good rebounder -- please, please, please be a good rebounder. I don't know if I can take another defensive possession like the last possession in regulation that the Trailblazers had against the Kings in one game that I went to last year. The Trailblazers missed four, count 'em, four, shots in like the last 30 seconds and got the rebounds and then that damn Nick Van Exel made a three to tie the game with a couple of seconds left. THAT SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN. The Kings won in overtime, but, jeez, GET A REBOUND. (What is the deal with Nick Van Exel's name, anyway? He certainly doesn't seem like the dashing 18th century Dutch painter that his name suggests.)

To me, one of the big, big upsides with Shareef is his background. He's played for 9 years, I think, and has never played in the playoffs. He is a guy who has been an All-Star while playing in the dregs of the NBA. I'm guessing that he is going to play like crazy to win. Remember 2001-02, when Mike Bibby lit it up in the playoffs and everyone went bananas about him? He was coming out of 3 or 4 years of losing like crazy in Vancouver. Guess who his teammate was? Shareef. There's a nice undercurrent of guys having something to prove with the new Kings team. Shareef should want to prove that he can win. Miller probably feels like he will always have something to prove after how he had to start playing in Turkey or Bangaledesh or something like that when first came out of college. Bonzi Wells should want to show that he isn't a self-centered jerk (hopefully). If nothing else, it's a contract year for Peja. And Bibby is Bibby, The Man, Maker of Clutch Jump Shots and Epicure of Pressure.

Enough about Shareef, what about Geoff Petrie? They say that it is better to be lucky than good. What about if you're both? Petrie is very good, of course. Mike Bibby for Jason Williams straight up. Drafting Peja in the first round in 1996. Drafting Hedo. Webber for old Mitch Richmond. Three-team deal for Brad Miller, where Hedo went to San Antonio and didn't stay a year and Scot Pollard went to Indiana. Two guys who didn't contribute anything last year (man, that hurts to say, but Bobby Jackson only played like 25 games last year) for Bonzi Wells, who has averaged 19 a game before. A second-round draft pick for Darius Songaila. Picking up Jimmy Jackson off the waiver wire. The guy is a genius.

With Shareef, though, Petrie was just straight out lucky. The Nets offered the Trailblazers more than the Kings could in a sign-and-trade, so Shareef was headed to New Jersey, but their doctors got scared and Petrie swoops in. That's luck. Moreover, because of the Nets, Petrie gets the Kings a discount on Shareef. Even if Shareef's infamous scar tissue causes him problems at some point down the road, look at it this way: (1) if the Kings win a ring next year, it's worth it; and (2) it could be worse -- you could be Philadelphia being on the hook for Webber at $20 million a year for the next two years.

With the acquisition of Shareef, you have to step back and look at the magnitude of what Petrie has pulled off in the last year or so. He has remade the team from a declining borderline contender back into a contender on the fly while dumping two big salaries -- Webber and Christie -- and spreading the salaries around a little more so that they are more easily moveable. You have to look at these maneuvers in the context of what it has taken for other NBA teams to remake themselves. Jordan retired from the Bulls in 1998 and it took until this last year for them to show a pulse again. Phoenix, Orlando, Atlanta and other teams have basically gone into whole seasons with the intent of just surviving to create cap space the following summer. That's kind of what Portland is doing now. Petrie, however, remakes the Kings on the fly and ends up with what looks like one of the better teams in the NBA. (I think that there is probably one more big deal left in the next several months. It would be completely unsurprising if Petrie trades Kenny Thomas -- a very talented guy with a big salary who may not fit very well with the Kings -- at the trade deadline next season to some team that thinks it just needs a little bit to make the playoffs or get over the top or something. That would clear cap space and probably get some draft picks or good young guys in return.) Long live Geoff Petrie.

Golf

You thought this post was going to be about the Kings getting Shareef Abdur-Rahim, didn't you? Don't worry, we'll get to that in the near future. (I like that name. It isn't quite as melodious as Hakeem Olajuwon, Muhammad Ali or Zinedine Zindane, but it's pretty cool.) Today's post, however, is about golf.

I freakin' love to play golf.

I've been playing golf a long time, since I was nine, when my grandfather (called him Papa) started taking me out not long after he recovered from having broken his hip. It was like February or March of 1980 and, at the time, I thought the coolest part about it -- aside from Papa buying me Munch peanut brittle bars and Cokes while telling me that he didn't know if I was "worth a dollar for my hide and tallow" -- was how you could slide the golf clubs around in the dew like the U.S. Olympic hockey players slid their sticks (if you have a problem with the phraseology, give me something else) around while winning the gold medal that year.

There were a lot of good things and maybe two semi-bad things wrapped up in that. First, playing golf with Papa was an awfully good thing and I played an awful lot of golf with him. Second, I learned a lot about being a civilized human being from him while playing golf -- like not being so worked up about your own game that you screw it up for the people you're playing with, remembering that's it's a game that supposed to be fun, always remembering to shake hands after the round, that kind of stuff. Third, picking up golf early is a gift for your future life. It's what people do in business and it's a good thing to be halfway competent at it. Now about the couple of bad things. First, peanut brittle and Coke probably didn't help my teeth much, although I won't blame my two root canals solely on that. Second, Papa liked to play golf way early in the morning, so there were times when I was freakin' freezing. I remember one time when we started playing at about 7 am one December morning when, by about the 14th hole, I was biting my hands to get some feeling in them. Oh well, after they invented orange golf balls, you could use those in the winter and still find them when the course was frosted over. You haven't lived until you've played golf on a frosted course in southern San Joaquin Valley tule fog. Good times, good times.

Playing golf contributed to me being more than little geeky in those oh-so-enjoyable pre-teen and teenage years. The Muse still gives me a bad time about having a Golf Digest subscription when I was 12, although, hey, now that Snoop Dogg is doing commercials where he plays golf with Lee Iacocca, I prefer to think that I was ahead of my time.

I played on the high school team and, while still kind of geeky, there was a little bit of cool in that. One of my best memories of high school is still the time during my freshman year when I played a match for the last spot on the traveling squad (the way our league played, eight guys from each school played in the matches). One of the other players was a big basketball star who was a junior. He hit these banana slices so he would aim about 50 yards left of the fairway and slice the ball into the middle. It was only a nine-hole match and I had built up like a four-shot lead after six holes. I figured I had it in the bag. On no. 7, however, I screwed up and made a double-bogey 5 and he buried like a 30-foot putt for a 2. OK, one-shot lead, I can hold that, except I made a 5 and he made a 4 on no. 8. There was also a third player -- we were playing for his spot on the traveling squad; when he got a driver's license, he got an old 240Z that could get up to 100 mph or so in the mile or so from the high school to the golf course, or so I heard -- and he tied me on no. 8 too. So all three of us go into the last hole tied. It's a par 5 and I hit two good 3-woods to leave an easy wedge pitch to the green. The other guys did something bad, I don't remember what, so they're not going to make a par. I, however, kind of chunk my wedge and get it just barely on the edge of the green, about 25 feet from the hole. If I can get down in two, I win. I putt from the edge of the green and leave the ball about 4 feet from the hole. OK, if I make this putt, I win. If I don't, we all tie and go play some more. Man, that was a long 4 feet, but the putt went in. I almost floated home, puffy hair and all. Actually, my mom picked me because I couldn't drive, but still.

Once I went to college, I didn't play golf much for quite a while. I think I played maybe twice in college. I would play once in while in law school, usually just to get ready for the law school tournament, which involved a decent amount of beer and a lot of Latin phrases that non-attorneys don't use. (Did hit one of my better shots ever in one of those tournaments, a punch shot with a 3-iron under a tree that went about 150 yards and around a sand trap to about 10 feet. Our team missed the birdie putt, though, damn.) The summer between my second and third years of law school, I clerked at Napa firm that had a few golf nuts, including one guy who is really good and is the son of MacDonald Carey from Days of Our Lives. When they found out I played golf, they took me out to the Napa Country Club a few times and even Silverado once. That rocked. (Napa Country Club is a gorgeous course. There's one par-3 -- no. 4 or 6, I think -- plays over a little creek and is one of the prettiest holes that I have ever personally played.)

Played some more when we were in San Luis Obispo, but I discovered a relatively unfortunate fact: playing golf is pretty expensive. With The Mermaid's arrival, my golfing was somewhat limited. I did have one of my two eagles during that period, though: a wedge from about 100 yards that went in the hole on a short par-4 at the Avila Beach course. (That is my favorite course that I have played. Go play it. They built one hole that goes through a hill.)

In the last couple of years, The Muse has been telling me to go play golf more. This often comes up as the Kings season finishes -- badly, so far, because it's an unfortunate fact of being a sports fan that anything other than a ring really isn't a good ending. This year, I took her up on it and I try to play 9 holes every weekend. This has been great, except that it has accentuated the fact that I can't hardly keep my driver on the course. It does this just fantastic thing where the ball starts out going about 30 degrees right of where I'm aiming and then starts fading even further right. Then shots with more of my other clubs want to turn left. The thing with the driver is kind of counterinituitive (usually shots that starts out going right turn back toward the middle, if they turn -- the physics of golf is for another post). I was going to go get fitted for a new driver, but then I turned my ankle playing softball (yet another post) and haven't been able to go yet.

So all of this has been a really long-winded introduction to what happened yesterday. I am very fortunate that one of my partners is a member at a country club and invites me to play with him once in a while. He invited me to play yesterday. I decided that I would just leave the driver in the bag and hit 3-woods off the tee to try to keep the ball on the course. So that's what I tried to do. And, on the front nine, I ended up playing golf better than I have since high school. After 3 holes, I was 1-under par. Things got a little sloppy after that and I ended up looking at about an 8-foot putt on no. 9 where, if I made it, I would have a 39 for the front nine. I haven't played 9 holes in the 30's since high school (like the two golf practices I played my senior year before I quit the team, having decided that I had more important things to do -- there's 3 months of free golf every day that I'm never going to get back). I missed the putt. I planned for maybe half-an-inch too little break and the putt hit the bottom side of the cup and spun out. So I shot a 40. The back nine got real sloppy and I started in with my frequent golf role of The Webbed Toe, Forest Explorer.

But, my god, a 40 that could easily have been a 37 or 38. (If you hadn't guessed yet, golf is a somewhat addictive experience that affect users' perceptions of reality.) That's enough to keep me going for years. It puts my two long-term golf goals -- breaking 80 over 18 and playing well enough to play Pebble Beach without embarrassing myself -- somewhere in sight. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel like, boy, if I just practiced a little more, maybe I could be decent at this. Golf, it's a great game. Now, if that putt had just gone in, that would have rocked. I would have had to keep the scorecard. But it didn't. Damn game.

Tremors

Have you seen Tremors? No? Why, why, why not? Go down to your video store and pull it out of the bowels of the Action section where it probably lives with things like Richard Chamberlain's classic King Solomon's Mines and take it home and drink a beer (if you're over 21, Intenseus and Guitar Guy) and watch it. Alternatively, get it from Netflix, although that won't give you the same jolt of self-esteem as pulling a New Classic out of the dregs of the video shelves with the fading boxes.

For the uninitiated, Tremors is a movie that was released in about 1990. It stars Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross and Reba Mcintyre. It is about a group of loser-types, survivalist nutjob types, an overeager grad student, a token teenager and a token child who live in some nameless desert valley whose lives are threatened by giant man-eating worms. Yes, giant man-meating worms! Various people get eaten, there's a lot of standing on buildings and, in the end, the giant man-eating worms are defeated.

The Muse and I first caught Tremors flipping channels one day in the mid-90's on one of the Bay Area UHF channels. It might have been channel 20, which used to have people's dogs on commercial breaks. We hadn't seen it in a long time. My parents were here this weekend and mentioned that they had seen this funny movie Tremors and the Muse and I welcomed them to our exclusive club. Two hours later, the Muse and I were flipping channels and came across . . . on the SciFi Channel . . . the last 45 minutes of Tremors!

Anyway, it rocks. When the worms are chasing someone (they feel the vibrations of people running and walking around), the camera cuts to a worm's-eye view of dirt flying by. Michael Gross and Reba Mcintyre play survivalist nuts with a basement full of guns and ammo and basically blow all of it shooting up one of the worms. At one point, Gross breaks the glass cabinet and gets his elephant gun, which he uses to finish off the worm. OK, why was the elephant gun in a glass cabinet when there were a thousand other guns hanging on the wall? It makes no sense, but that's Tremors. It doesn't care, it's funny. When a worm gets blown up or otherwise exploded, it blows apart in this totally fake orange stuff. Big fun. There's a lot of talk about these stinkin' (or something-in') worms "can't be smarter than us." It also features one of the great lines uttered at the climax of a movie ever. I won't quote it here, so you can enjoy it yourself when the time is right. (On a little bit more serious note, I quite appreciate that the child is never really placed in harm's way. That kind of stuff bugs me, which is the subject for a future post.)

Tremors is also great because you can play fantasy Hollywood games about it. Not Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, although you could play a pretty good game of that this with movie. Kevin Bacon (via Tremors to) Michael Gross (via a Law & Order episode to) Jerry Orbach (also via Law & Order to) Sam Waterson (via The Killing Fields to) Haing S. Ngor. Kevin Bacon (via Tremors to)Fred Ward (via Remo Williams to) Joel Silver (via Cabaret to) Liza Minnelli (via birth and a 60's TV special to) Judy Garland (via, you know, to) The Munchkins. Tremors is a good one for Fantasy Movie Pitch too. This game is inspired by a comedian the Muse and I saw once talking about Edward Scissorhands: "How did Tim Burton pitch this movie? OK, I want to make a movie about a guy with scissorhands for hands . . . who looks like the lead singer of the Cure. OK, OK, whatta you think?" For Tremors, it would have to be something like: "OK, let's make a movie about giant man-eating worms with the dad from Family Ties as a gun nut? Whatta you think?"

What would be even more fun would be playing Fantasy Agent Pitch. If you watch Entourage, it would be kind of like Ari trying to sell Vince on Aquaman. For Michael Gross, it maybe went something like: "AGENT: Michael, you want to play a gun nut survivalist guy in a movie about giant man-eating worms? MR. GROSS: Sure, 'cause I was sick of playing Alex P. Keaton's liberal, aging hippie dad." For Fred Ward, maybe: "AGENT: They never quite made that sequel to Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Wanna be a leading man again? Oh yeah, there's giant man-eating worms. MR. WARD: Sure, it can't be as strange as being in a movie with the guy from Cabaret playing a bullet-dodging monk or something." (BTW, Remo Williams is a very underrated movie. Joel Silver was dodging bullets in that one almost 15 years before Keanu. They hadn't invented bullet time yet, though.) Reba Mcintyre, maybe: "AGENT: They're offering you a gig in a movie with giant man-eating worms. So? MS. MCINTYRE: Well, got to start my movie career somehow." Kevin Bacon, maybe (remember this is about 1990, not now): "AGENT: Been a while since Footloose. MR. BACON: Yeah."

Anyway, go watch yourself some Tremors. Save it for some Saturday evening when you're thinking you've got nothing to do. Have a beer (if you're over 21, Intenseus and Guitar Guy) and have a good time. I think you want to avoid the sequels, though. They always sounded pretty cheesy.

Attractiveness Constant Update

The Muse and I took Mermaid and Enthusio to see March of the Penguins last weekend. It's pretty amazing what nature comes up with. The penguins come out of the ocean and walk like 70 miles across Antarctica, find mates, conceive and hatch their eggs. The mothers then pass the eggs to the fathers, who hold them on their feet under their fur for several weeks while the mothers walk back to the ocean to go eat. None of the penguins have eaten at this point since they left the ocean. The fathers all huddle together while they're not eating through the dead of Antarctica winter (80 degrees below 0 with 100 degree wind chill). The mothers come back and feed the chicks and then the fathers march out to the ocean (after not eating for 3 months or so) to eat and then. After that, the mothers and fathers take turns going out to the ocean to eat. Finally, around April, the ice has melted so that the ocean is really close to the breeding grounds and all of the penguins go to the ocean to eat. It's pretty something else.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is an update on the apparent collapse of the natural law that was the Attractiveness Constant. The preview for the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (which is probably my favorite Harry Potter book so far) preceded March of the Penguins. Apparently, the director told Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) and Rupert Grint (Ron) to grow their hair as long and scuzzy-looking as they liked. Check it out at http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/gobletoffire/index.html. Meanwhile, Emma Watson (Hermoine) -- in keeping with the Attractiveness Constant's collapse -- is normal-looking and seems to be growing up normally. Which begs the initial question: why is this happening?!? Nonethless, the movie looks cool. Maybe Harry will cut his hair at the end of the movie because he has to get serious after Voldemort returns.

All the President's Men

Just finished All the President's Men. I have always been something of a Watergate junkie. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor in the living room in the house on the dairy with my dad watching a show on TV where there were these two long rows of people. I would've been 2 or 3. It took me about 25 or 30 years, but eventually I realized that we were probably watching the Senate Watergate hearings. There is also a story in my family about me when I was 2 or so talking about Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor that Nixon fired that really got Nixon in deep. I wrote a paper in 8th grade about Nixon. I guess, with this background, it wasn't a big surprise that I became an attorney.

Anyway, when Mark Felt outed himself as Deep Throat, I pretty much read everything about it and I realized that I had never read All the President's Men. I'd seen the movie a bunch of times and it was very good, but I'd never read the book. The next time I was in a used book store, I picked it up and started reading it right after finishing the new Harry Potter book.

The movie of course had to condense the story. The movie REALLY condensed the story. It's pretty unreal how many sources Woodward and Bernstein talked to, chased down, followed up with. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of people over the course of a couple of years. They started pulling all of these little strings beginning with the first court hearing after burglars got caught breaking into the national Democratic Party headquarters when one of the burglars identified his occupation as an anti-Communist. (As an aside, how do get a job like that? What do you put on your resume? The burglars got caught because they left duct tape on the doors they used to get in so that a security guard saw it. Apparently, you don't have to be good at burgling to be an anti-Communist.) Woodward and Bernstein weren't political reporters. They were city reporters, reporting about criminal court hearings and that kind of thing. They just kept following what sources were telling them.

Whatever you think of the results of Watergate, the book also shows that it took serious fuerza to keep following the story. The movie plays up the scene at the end where Woodward comes back from talking to Bernstein, turns on classical music loudly and starts typing stuff about how Deep Throat says that their houses might be bugged and people might try to kill them. That isn't very prominent in the book. What is prominent is that basically, day after day, the White House press secretary was saying that the newspaper stories about Watergate were ridiculous and totally false and claiming that the reporters' paper was just out to get Nixon. At one point, the reporters made what seems like a pretty minor error. They wrote that one of their sources had given testimony about various people's control over a secret slush fund. The source's attorney denied the story the next day. Basically, it turned out that the source had meant that he would've given that testimony, but wasn't asked by the prosecutors in front of the grand jury. This mistake was treated like a national disaster by the press secretary and others. Nonetheless, the reporters kept going and, eventually, it turned out that their stories were essentially correct.

The book also seems like a pretty stark contrast with the way it seems like politics are covered now. Basically, it seems like few media organizations have the patience to follow a story the way that the Washington Post followed Watergate. Unless stories are pretty salacious, it doesn't seem like major media organizations are particularly interested them long-term. In particular, it seems unlikely that someone would allow reporters to chase a story that starts out as small as Watergate did to figure out what its full implications are.

One last thing that the book does is it suggests how long the country was largely rudderless while Watergate was going on. Nixon didn't resign until August 9, 1974. The book describes how, between April 19, 1973, and April 30, 1973, the upper White House staff just felt apart. On April 19, the reporters wrote a story saying that Nixon's 1972 deputy campaign director, Jeb Macgruder, was telling prosecutors that Nixon's White House attorney and his 1972 campaign manager had been in on the whole mess. On April 30, enough stuff had happened that Nixon's chief of staff, another upper White House aide, the U.S. Attorney General and the chief in-house White House attorney all either quit or were fired, largely because they had been involved with the whole mess (I don't think that the Attorney General was actually involved). Nixon didn't resign for 16 months after his upper staff fell apart. (It would be like if Karl Rove and Dick Cheney had to resign today because they had cooked up this Valerie Palme thing and then Bush kept being president until December 2006.) This is while Vietnam was going on and Israel, Egypt and Syria had a war that almost dragged the U.S. and Soviet Union in and that led to the first OPEC oil boycott of the U.S. Not a real good time for the President to be all screwed up.

I guess I'm just glad that I was only 2 or 3 at the time and didn't know what was going on. I just got to sit on the floor eating with my dad.