Suck it, Sammy

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The SEC’s Florida Gators showed Oklahoma what for last night as Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow bagged their second national championship in 3 years, this time quashing Oklahoma and this year’s Heisman winner Sam Bradford (Tebow, of course, already has one of those). Final score: 24 to 14, but it wasn’t that close.

For their part, the Sooners extended their run of big-game chokes; this is their third consecutive bowl loss for the Sooners (after back-to-back Fiesta Bowls, losing to West Virginia last year and, more memorably, Boise in the 2007 game). In point of fact, the Sooners have only won ONE bowl since their 2003 Rose Bowl win (over Oregon in the 2005 Holiday Bowl; OU’s lone BCS title was in the 00-01 season, over FSU).

Meyer is now the first coach to pick up two BCS-era championships, and raises the SEC to 5 and 0 in the title game (2 each for LSU and Florida; one for Tennessee; unless I’m wrong, Tebow is now the only college QB to play in and win two title games as well.) No other conference has a winning record in this game; in fact, the 2nd place conference has only 2 wins (Big XII, with Texas and Oklahoma) vs. 4 losses (3 x OU, 1 Nebraska). We still contend that the Longhorns would’ve been a better choice for this game, but Big XII rules kept that from happening.

(To round out the BCS tally: The Big 10, ACC, and Big East are all 1-2 in championship play, and the Pac 10 is 1-1. In all, eleven teams have played in the title game, a stat that tells the same story of SEC dominance with a side of Big XII contention: 3 are SEC, 3 are Big XII, 2 are Big East, and 1 each from Big 10, ACC, and Pac-10)

All this, of course, hasn’t escaped journalistic notice.

Final AP standings mirror, sort of, what we’d expect; we find no argument with it based on what we can know for certain in a no-playoff universe:

  1. Florida
  2. Utah
  3. USC
  4. Texas
  5. Oklahoma
  6. Alabama

See you next year. Aside from draft-related commentary, Heathen now returns to a much more pure-geek-and-lefty-politics mode until next August.

It’s Beastie Friday

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Check out their appearance on Letterman from 2004; they start a couple blocks away and work their way into the studio on a long, wide-angle tracking shot.

He didn’t learn manners like that in Texas

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Remember how the Obamas asked if they could move into Blair House early, so that their children could start school in January with minimal turmoil? And remember how the Bush White House said “nope, already booked?”

Yeah, turns out it wasn’t. The supposed booking — for one night, for right-wing darling John Howard, PM of New Zealand Australia (thanks, I.K.; mea culpa) — hadn’t happened yet. And Blair House? 119 rooms, 35 bathrooms. As the linked story points out, that’s more than enough room for a family of four plus a visiting dignitary for a single night. Hell, for a single night, it’s not at all clear why Howard couldn’t stay in the White House itself.

Classy to the end, these guys. Don’t let the doors hit you on the ass on the way out.

One way of interpreting the BCS

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Over at Salon, King Kaufman has an amusing take on the mess that is the BCS Championship this year; for those not paying attention, the only undefeated squad left is Utah, who beat usual SEC powerhouse Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Bama very nearly played for the championship; they lost of Florida, who will play Oklahoma for all the marbles tonight.

Kaufman:

This column has already crowned its national champion. With its background in the boxing world, this column believes if you’re not going to have a fair championship system, the best alternative is to crown the guy who beat the guy who beat the guy.

That guy is Tulane.

The Green Wave went 2-10 this year, but they made those wins count. One of them was over Louisiana-Monroe, so I think you see my point.

No? OK: Tulane beat Louisiana-Monroe, who beat Troy, who beat Middle Tennessee, who beat Maryland, who beat Wake Forest, who beat Mississippi.

Aha! Mississippi!

What do you mean, so what? Ole Miss beat Florida. But that’s not all. The Rebels also beat Texas Tech, who beat Texas, who beat Oklahoma.

There’s a direct line of losing from both teams in the BCS Championship Game to Tulane. That’s what makes Tulane, last seen losing 45-6 to Memphis, your 2008 national champion.

Ben Stein Hates Science

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Check it out:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Even the National Review is slamming him over this.

Ah, Alabama

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It shouldn’t really surprise me that letters to the editor in (in particular red state, small town) newspapers are filled with the stupid, since really they’re just a manual version of modern comment-on-story features at newspaper web sites — and the only thing dumber than those chuckleheads are YouTube commenters.

Still, when you run across something like this, it does sort of make you think we’re all fucking doomed.

Good News/Bad News

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The good news is that for thirty cents a track, Apple’s iTunes Music Store will allow you to upgrade any 128kbps DRM’d tracks you bought previously for DRM-free 256kbps versions, which is kind of a no-brainer.

The bad news is that you can’t do this for anything that’s been withdrawn from the iTunes store, and some of the DRM’d music I’d like very much to unlock and improve is on the Complete U2 digital box set — which Universal (who are still assholes) has apparently pulled from iTMS as of about a year ago.

(Obviously not all 446 tracks, mind you; that’d cost almost as much as the box set did to begin with — I really just want to unlock the live/unreleased/rare stuff that isn’t duplicated with CDs Mrs Heathen and I already own.)

Fuck.

Change.

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As head of the Office of Legal Counsel — the Executive unit that Bush used to spread the notion of the imperial executive — Obama has picked Dawn Johnsen, the Indiana U. law prof who has been publically assailing “Bush’s corrpution of American ideals” for years:

Upon the release last spring of a secret Office of Legal Counsel memo that permitted the aggressive interrogations of terrorism suspects, she excoriated the unit’s lawyers for advising Bush “that in fighting the war on terror, he is not bound by the laws Congress has enacted.”

“One of the refreshing things about Dawn Johnsen’s appointment is that she’s almost a 180-degree shift from John Yoo and David Addington and (Vice President) Dick Cheney ,” Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe said, referring to the main legal architects of the administration’s approval of harsh interrogation tactics.

Either they have no shame, or they’re COMPLETELY un-self-aware

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John Bolton and John Yoo are in the Times today insisting on what amounts to rollbacks of Executive power.

They begin, again, without ANY note of irony whatsoever:

THE Constitution’s Treaty Clause has long been seen, rightly, as a bulwark against presidential inclinations to lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments. The clause will likely be tested by Barack Obama’s administration, as the new president and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, led by the legal academics in whose circles they have long traveled, contemplate binding down American power and interests in a dense web of treaties and international bureaucracies.

The problem with the GOP

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It’s much, much bigger than Bush, or Bush’s policies. Krugman nails it:

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

He concludes:

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

Nutbird of the Year, via the Skeptic

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Jenny McCarthy, with an honorable mention to Jim Carrey. McCarthy has taken “airhead blonde” to new heights by going with her gut feeling that her son’s autism was caused by vaccination — despite all medical evidence to the contrary. And because she’s wealthy — and is dating the even wealthier Carrey — she can get people to listen to her, which is a public health disaster in a country (and world) where critical thinking skills are in absurdly short supply.

McCarthy is too arrogantly ignorant to appreciate the depths of her own ignorance. She feels that her mommy instincts and her dabblings on the internet were enough to trump the consensus of expert opinion built on numerous high quality studies that shows that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

[…]

Jenny McCarthy is a dangerous deluded crank who does not have the sliver of common sense or humility it would take to consider the possibility that perhaps she does not understand the science as well as trained scientists. At the very least she should recognize that this is a controversy – one that should be decided by the scientific evidence.

It’s like a late Christmas present to people who like facts

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Giant swinging dick and all-around smart guy Zbigniew Brzezinski lays the smackdown on Joe Scarborough on his own show during a discussion of the Gaza conflict in the larger context of mideast relations in the last 20 or so years. Among other things, Z pointed out that under Clinton, we had a policy of engagement and discussion for both sides of the issue, and kept Israel and Arafat at the table — which cut down on violence. Until 1/01, when Clinton left office and Bush more or less abandoned that approach. Anyway, Joe said something stupid, to which ZB replied “You know, you have such a stunning superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.” HuffPo has video. Don’t miss it.

Dept. of Early Bloomers

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The Foodie at Fifteen blog’s most recent entry recounts the author’s third trip to Per Se, wherein he blew the last of his summer job money.

Dude. All I bought was a guitar and some weed. Also, I didn’t eat any of Keller’s food until I was 30. Go read this; it’s delightful. And not at all overdone; if Per Se is on par with Keller’s other kitchen, if anything this kid undersells the experience.

Alberto Gonzales remains a Douchebag

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During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that “for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”

WTF, Gonzo? This blogger sums it up:

This is pretty much the most clueless statement I can imagine. The treatment Gonzales received concerned the program of politicizing the department he was in charge of, the Department of Justice. It came after a string of answers which showed Gonzales either didn’t know at all what was happening in his own DOJ, or was purposely misleading Senators with a string of “I do not recall” answers. Gonzales now doesn’t just fail to recall, he fails to understand the enormity of his incometencies. Look for no responsibility taken in this book.

Worse here is that Gonzales compares himself to the real victims in the War on Terror, the men and women who died on 9/11, the soldiers who died because of Bush’s policies, the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead. . . those are victims of the “War on Terror.” Mr. Gonzales is at worst complicit in some of those deaths in that he helped justify some ugly policies. At best, Gonzales is merely a bumbling incompetent.

More on the interview over at TPM; the TPM excerpt includes this heartwarming quote:

The Harvard Law School graduate, onetime corporate lawyer and Texas judge also hasn’t been able to land a job. He has delivered a few paid speeches, done some mediation work and plans to do some arbitration, but said law firms have been “skittish” about hiring him.

Some small justice, I suppose.

The most football fun I’ve had all year

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Courtesy of a certain longtime Heathen, I attended the Texas Bowl this evening with a cadre of Rice alums I haven’t seen in some time — most of them have moved to Austin (or, worse, the suburbs) in the 14 years since we all used to drink too much at the Marquis, so it was a fun group to watch a game with no matter what was going to happen.

However, what actually DID happen was pretty great, as the Rice Owls (astoundingly 9-3 going into this) trounced Western Michigan (also 9-3 pre-game) 38 to 14 — and it wasn’t that close. Both the WMU TDs came well after the game was mathematically over. Rice, for its part, bags its first bowl win since the 1954 Cotton Bowl, when they beat a certain western Alabama team all right-thinking Heathen know and love.

To say the accumulated Owl faithful were gobsmacked by the win — and the dominance of the performance — is to understate by several orders of magnitude. “Rice kids” from 18 to 80 stood outside the stadium watching the postgame fireworks, slackjawed at the spectacle of it all. I feel bad for the WMU folks (nobody likes getting routed), but their day will come; Cubit’s a good coach, and he’s doing good things up there. Rice, though, has been waiting a long, long time, and I’m glad I was there to see it.

Cary, one more time

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The Chronicle’s list of stars who died in 2008 is made of national or international luminaries like George Carlin, William Buckley, Bo Diddley, and David Foster Wallace — and also our friend and local artist Cary Winscott, who died in September after a battle with cancer.

I’ve complained about the Chron’s theater coverage a whole lot over the years, but this is a really fine gesture that I know Cary’s friends appreciate deeply.

Update: The Houston Press does one better. Here Cary makes their top 5 biggest Houston losses, a list that puts him in the same room with Michael DeBakey.

Cary Winscott. Not a big name, to be sure, but a big part of the antic and edgy goings-on at Infernal Bridegroom Productions (Notable death, 2007). He was only 38, and his death hit hard in the alt-theater community.

We miss you, man.

They always kill the dog

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What is it with cops killing unthreatening dogs? Radley Balko explores the issue, along with its strong correlation with absurdly out-of-scale paramilitary tactics. One anecdote involves plainclothes cops skulking around a private home with no warrant, and then killing the dog anyway.

Nothing, of course, ever happens to the cops who do this.

I’m too lazy to check, but..

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…I’m reasonably sure there’s a post about It’s A Wonderful Life for very nearly every year this site has existed. This is the 2008 version, spawned largely by this excellent piece from the New York times that points out something I’ve long kinda kept under my hat:

Capra’s film is really about the loss of dreams, and making do with what you get.

George wanted nothing in his life more than to escape boring old Bedford Falls, and is thwarted at every turn. He was denied even his generational globe-trotting (if harrowing) war-travel birthright because of his ear. Moreover, it’s not just the Universe giving George the finger; it’s his own family — his brother welshes on their deal, and instead of returning after college to run the B&L (and allow George to get his degree, too), he runs off to get married and work for his new in-laws somewhere else. When the crash comes, even hopes of a temporary escape collapse as George and Mary use their seed money to keep the B&L afloat.

From the NYT piece:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

He’s right. And yet still we watch it. It’s a horror film in many ways, but one where the monster isn’t Jason or Freddie; instead, the thing under the bed is a stultifying hometown filled with people who love you. How twisted is that?

(Also amusing: I followed that article to the Wikipedia article about Gloria “Violet” Grahame; hers was a sordid Hollywood life, and included a number of paramours — as well as the distinction of spawning children by both Nicholas Ray and, later, Tom Ray — her former stepson. Wild!)

Tagged.

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I’ve never bothered with one of these things before, but there’s a first time for everything. Also, I’m watching my Windows Server VM update itself so I can do some testing, and that drastically limits what I can do besides “write text” for the moment.

So, seven random things about Chief Heathen, which turns out to be harder to make interesting if you’ve got eight years of blog posts illuminating most of your life.

  1. I wish I could sing. It turns out I have excellent pitch, but (apparently) neither the disposition to gain technical mastery of an instrument nor vocal cords that will do anything other than my normal speaking voice. It’s annoying.

  2. I hate old movies. Not all of them, just most of them. Generally speaking, if it was made before 1965, I probably have little interest in watching it. I’m not sure why this is — certainly the vocabulary of film became drastically more subtle and interesting in the auteur era of the 70s, and certainly too films made since I was born have more to offer me in terms of cultural resonance, but other than that kind of generality I can’t really explain my distaste for old movies. Obviously, there are exceptions for giants of the film canon, but for popular movies it’s a pretty hard and fast line.

  3. My most recent passport — sadly now expired — was issued in a city and country that no longer exist. On a student tour of the Soviet Union in 1991, we all got royally hammered more or less at every opportunity, and certainly before every Aeroflot ride. Between Moscow and Tbilisi, my passport must’ve slid out of my jacket as I napped (or was taken by a nefarious thief; it doesn’t really matter). This generated some great consternation for the tour leader (my Russian prof), but imposed no actual inconvenience aside from an early-morning trip to a photomat in Kiev for a replacement pic (where our Intourist guide forced the shopkeeper to take me immediately, and to hell with the 40 or so Ukrainians waiting in line). The actual passport wasn’t put together until our last city, where there was a U.S. consulate, and where I delighted myself by stepping back and forth across the threshold (“I’m in the US! I’m in the USSR! I’m in the US!” etc). Consequently, said passport — containing what must be the least flattering photo of me ever taken, and that’s saying something — is stamped “Issued by United States Consulate, Leningrad, U.S.S.R.”

  4. I’m shocked I’ve stayed in Houston 14 years. When I moved here in 1994, it was a lark — the idea was hatched in a drunken party weekend, and executed less than a month later. I assumed I’d live here for a bit, and then branch out. Except cool things kept happening, and I eventually bought a house, and my career turned into a travel-heavy thing (thereby rewarding me for living in mid-country), and I got involved in local nonprofits, and built a great network of friends, and here I am still. I still don’t think I’ll be here forever, but we sure do have good friends here. I just hate the summers.

  5. I’m coming to grips with my 20 years of science-fiction-fan apostasy, and have actually begun delving into the pool a bit more. I read piles and piles as a teen, but was pretty much done with it by late high school. Real books — and I still think of them as such — were more rewarding to me. In my thirties, flying as much as I do and in need of more reading material, I started sampling again, first with the Dresden novels and then with Scalzi’s work, but also with bigger bits at a friend’s suggestion. It’ll never be what I read by default again — too much of it is utter crap, poorly imagined and badly written, and in willful violation of this law — but it’s fun to include as part of my literary diet.

  6. I never really planned this technology career, so I still don’t really know where it’s going. There’s a lot to unpack there, but I mostly decided against going to grad school in creative writing because I didn’t want to be poor, and I liked hacking with computers as much as I liked writing. But I didn’t really give it much more thought than that. I sort of thought I’d keep writing, and while in some ways (e.g., here) I have, I really pretty much retired from fiction and poetry a long time ago. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. It’s also pretty obvious my nonprofit arts activities are attempts to scratch this particular itch by being close to art being done instead of really making any of my own, and (like most such replacements) that’s unlikely to be satisfying in the long haul.

  7. It will surprise no one for me to say that I’m a deeply cynical bastard; I trust people in general to be dumb as posts and venal besides, and to act stupidly in their own interests, or based on superficial lies. This cynicism extends to an utter disgust ar the willful and ham-handed emotional manipulation that is part and parcel of so much of pop culture, and said culture’s inability to separate sentiment from sentimentality. So it may actually surprise people to learn that “It’s a Wonderful Life” completely has my number, and that Sam Wainwright’s telegram makes me tear up every single year: MR GOWER CABLED YOU NEED CASH STOP MY OFFICE INSTRUCTED TO ADVANCE YOU UP TO TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS STOP HEE HAW AND MERRY CHRISTMAS SAM WAINWRIGHT

Seven people? You must be joking. Virtually none of my people blog. But I’ll try: Dorman, Christina, Patrick, JoAnn, Chris and Cathy, Noel, and Erin, for whom this is a surprise soft-launch. (Sorry, honey; your idea is too good not to push.)