soapbox

Two sports predictions:

First, that in the next 10-20 years, the NFL will be dramatically different from the game/institution that we know today, due to (long-overdue) attention to brain trauma. Concussions will be viewed the way we now view asbestos, where the blithe and dangerous attitude of times gone by will be unfathomable.

Secondly, that Tim Donaghy will eventually be viewed in the same light as Jose Canseco, and that’s meant very complimentarily. Canseco was once a ‘roided-up crackpot who spouted off random and crazy accusations but in the intervening decade or two has been proving correct on pretty much all counts. As for Donaghy, I present you this:

I worked a Knicks game in Madison Square Garden with him on February 26, 2007. New York shot an astounding 39 free throws that night to Miami’s paltry eight. It seemed like Stafford was working for the Knicks, calling fouls on Miami like crazy. Isiah Thomas was coaching the Knicks, and after New York’s four-point victory, a guy from the Knicks came to our locker room looking for Stafford, who was in the shower. He told us that Thomas sent him to retrieve Stafford’s home address; apparently, Stafford had asked the coach before the game for some autographed sneakers and jerseys for his kids. Suddenly, it all made sense.

Okay, no big deal, a ref gave away one game in exchange for some stuff from a Hall-of-Famer, right? Check this out:

In the pregame meeting prior to Game 6, the league office sent down word that certain calls-calls that would have benefitted the Lakers — were being missed by the referees. This was the type of not-so-subtle information that I and other referees were left to interpret. After receiving the dispatch, Bavetta openly talked about the fact that the league wanted a Game 7.

“If we give the benefit of the calls to the team that’s down in the series, nobody’s going to complain. The series will be even at three apiece, and then the better team can win Game 7,” Bavetta stated.

I mean, wow. Not even the Godfather himself (NBA Commish David Stern) will be able to cover this up, even if he sues both Amazon.com and Random House.

P.S. I have spent the last couple hours trying to figure out whether this is an april fools prank or not, given deadspin’s spotty history. But I think this is legit, it just makes too much sense.

In honor of 20 years of Simpsons (holy crap, really?), the November issue of Playboy is going to have Marge on the cover, posing with a bunny chair and little else:

No word on how much of Marge will be shown inside the issue, but “it’s very, very racy,” said editorial director James Jellinek, adding “she is a stunning example of the cartoon form.”

Evidently Hefner’s enterprise is worried that young people don’t like porn?

“We knew that this would really appeal to the 20-something crowd,” said Playboy spokeswoman Theresa Hennessey.

Apparently the Simpsons issue goes on sale in newstands next week, but subscribers to the magazine will find their copies “have a more traditional live model on the cover.”

I try to keep sports-posts to a relative minimum here, so I’ll condense two items into one:

(a) The bidding war between the co-founder of RIMM (blackberry maker) and the NHL has seen both sides sweeten their offers; the Phoenix Coyotes have been losing money hand over fist (hockey in Arizona, losing money, no way?!?) and going bankrupt, and so both parties have offered to pay the city for the rest of the lease, pay all parties to which the team is indebted, etc… and sadly, I’m forced to hope that the NHL is allowed to buy the team. Not because I believe in the NHL’s handling of anything, or in the NHL’s administration, but because it sets a horrible precedent for a team to be able to just declare bankruptcy and negotiate its purchase to somebody else and get moved to a different city, all without the League’s consent or input.

That said, the smartest possible move after the NHL buys the Coyotes would be to turn around and sell the team to Balsillie and let him move the franchise to Hamilton.

(b) Perhaps the most charismatic & talented young star has preemptively told the NHL that he’s going to play in the 2014 Olympics, with or without permission, saying that he will risk suspension and play for his country, Russia, regardless of whether the NHL is formally involved or not. “Nobody can say to me, ‘You can’t play for your country in the Olympic Games.’”

“Who can say you can’t play for your country in the Olympic Games? I think it’s …”

Unfair?

“It’s not unfair; it’s stupid,” he said. “Somebody don’t like it, see you next year.”

And good for him. Seriously, if watch only one game of hockey all season, I highly recommend it be Washington against some other star team – Pittsburgh, Philly, Detroit, or Chicago or Boston – and you won’t regret it.

As a visiprof, I’m probably only going to be here in Walla Walla for one year. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to get nice furniture for a crap apartment that I’m only in 3.5 days a week. On the other hand, my experiment of sleeping on a thermarest mattress proved that I needed something more.

Mattresses for normal beds are hundreds of dollars and, since I don’t want to carry this stuff all back at the end of the year, aren’t that easy to sell off. A futon, on the other hand, is a bed. It’s a sofa. It’s anything you want to imagine it to be. Of course, at furniture stores, they’re also multiple hundreds of dollars (plus money for delivery).

What’s the solution? Well, what store specializes in cheap furniture packed into very small boxes? Ikea!

That brings me to one of the coolest furniture assembly stories that I’ve ever had. The vacuum-packed futon. Idea first packs the mattress in a vacuum bag, sucks the air out, and then rolls it up. To unpack, you take off the outer plastic and you end up with a flat hard thing. Remove the second layer and there’s a sucking sound and the futon poofs up.

Much comfier than the thermarest too.

In addition to the overuse/misuse of antibiotics and Nathaniel’s suggestion about stocking up on said items, here’s another doomsday scenario to keep you up at night: Ug99

One consequence of the farce that is the current US Agricultural “plan” is the horrible dependence on pesticides combined with the use of hyper-genetically-modified grains. Monsanto has done a great job of marketing and as long as no foreign plagues are introduced, we’re all good – but between global warming and what stem rust, there’s reason to worry.

“A significant humanitarian crisis is inevitable,” said Rick Ward, the coordinator of the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

The solution is to develop new wheat varieties that are immune to Ug99. That’s much easier said than done.

After several years of feverish work, scientists have identified a mere half-dozen genes that are immediately useful for protecting wheat from Ug99. Incorporating them into crops using conventional breeding techniques is a nine- to 12-year process that has only just begun. And that process will have to be repeated for each of the thousands of wheat varieties that is specially adapted to a particular region and climate.

“All the seed needs to change in the next few years,” said Ronnie Coffman, a plant breeder who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project. “It’s really an enormous undertaking.”

So, it looks as though my current work computer has bitten the proverbial dust. I was having overheating problems all last week, and even before then the fans would spin up excessively – and this is a G5 tower, mind you, so 5 cooling fans at 3000 rpm made my office sound like an aircraft hangar.

So now the question comes to the replacement machine. Assuming I can get the “corp” to pay for it, what features are necessary and what can I do without? I’m tempted go for a bare-bones 8-core tower and then add RAM and hard drives separately, especially since being able to run calculations on 7 processors in parallel would be only/almost half as efficient as running on some of the “slow” 16-processors-per-node NAVO machines. Anyway, here’s hoping, and I welcome any insight/suggestions.

So, another item that was stuck in draft purgatory for a month or so before I was able to actually post it…. a circle of iPhones that are both listening to and playing a very abstract kind of “music.” Each one picks up ambient sounds, runs that through a series of software filters to make it sound more musical, and finally plays the result back (with rhythm).

As each iPhone is picking up the tune from the other iPhones it’s playing it back through the same filters, and so on and so forth. All while the software is “judging” each “cell” of sound, to see if it’s interesting or loud enough or so forth, and cells will live or die based on that criteria — in essence, a musical organism.

a warning: it’s not exactly friendly to the ears, especially the first one – don’t use headphones.