Northbound

When Hillary Clinton makes this speech as part of her 2012 re-election campaign, don’t say you weren’t warned:

Our veterinary health care system is plagued with under-use, overuse and misuse. It is, simply put, broken. As President, I will make it my mission to fix it, starting by helping the 250 million dogs, cats and ferrets without public or private insurance who face skyrocketing costs, inadequate care, and bureaucratic obstacles to coverage.

Today, I’m announcing a seven point plan to lower veterinary care costs for all American pets and again to make our animal healthcare system, without doubt from any corner, the best in the world. Building a national consensus around these cost savings is the first crucial step to cover all American pets with quality, affordable healthcare.

You just wait.

I never write about basketball, but, hey, two hoop-related posts in a row.  I figured out something that had been bothering Bill Simmons:

Still, I don’t see Oden ending up with a better [nickname] alternative. He’s trapped in that vaguely bland Sampras/Duncan/Ewing zone, where it makes the most sense to call him Greg. There is Robert Parish’s nickname, The Chief, because Oden is similarly stoic and regal, but I’m morally opposed to recycled nicknames. I believe LaDainian Tomlinson should do time for stealing LT from LT. Plus, others might be morally opposed on PC grounds. So The Chief is out, and Greg it is.

Anyway, after watching the draft, it came to me.  Greg Oden is “The Dentist”. 

I am apparently not the first to come up with this — some yahoo at Yahoo Answers suggested it first — but it’s perfect.  Of course, Oden has already told ESPN that he’d like to be a dentist, so you start out from there.  But what do dentists do?  Dentists fill holes.  What do basketball players do?  They fill holes (you know, they put the ball into the hoop, which is just a big hole).  It’s a natural.

And what happens to you when you go into the paint against The Dentist?  You get drilled.

And what happens when the Memphis Grizzlies come to Portland and are worried about it?  Well, they’re going to see The Dentist, they should be worried. 

Got tickets for Blazers-Knicks and have to leave work early?  Tell everyone you have an appointment with The Dentist.

Driving the lane for the layup?  The Dentist will see you now. 

Oden plays the Sixers.  They had The Doctor, but Portland has The Dentist.

The more I think about it, the more I like it.  Greg “The Dentist” Oden.  Has a ring to it.

Simmons, you paying attention?  Come on, make it happen.  Greg Oden.  The Dentist.  Get to it before Stuart Scott does.  Boo-yah.

The first pick in the NBA Draft last night for the Dallas Mavericks was one Nick Fazekas of the University of Nevada, about who I know next to nothing, except for three facts:

• He is white.
• He is very tall (six-eleven).
• He will fail in Dallas.

Oh, you don’t think so?  Let me educate you, my friend.  For years — for decades — the Dallas Mavericks have been chasing down the elusive myth of the Big White Guy, the guy they needed to put butts in seats at Reunion Arena and the A/A Center.  Somehow, someway, despite changes in ownership and coaching and general managers, Dallas always picks big, white, stiff guys in the draft, and they always fail.  You could blame it on Shawn Bradley, the biggest, stiffest, whitest guy in America, and of course, a longtime Maverick.  But it goes back further than that.  Call it the Curse of Kiki Vandeweghe.

Let’s review the bidding:

• Kiki Vandeweghe His Own Bad Self.  Eleventh pick of the 1980 draft by the Mavericks; the first pick they ever made.  Never played a minute for the Mavericks.  He refused to sign with the then-expansion team, and was traded to the Nuggets.  Dallas fans have booed him ever since (even when he was working for the team as a scout).  And ever since then, every time the Mavericks have drafted a big white player, failure has followed.
• Bill Garnett.  Two years later, the fourth pick in the draft (right behind the Hawks at #3, who took Dominique Wilkins).  Six-nine, white, clumsy, slow.  Started a total of 62 games in the Association.  Averaged five points a game.  The poster boy for the word “bust”.
• Detlef Schrempf.  Okay, he had a decent career, but he didn’t do it in Dallas.  He won Sixth Man of the Year twice for the Pacers, and went to three All-Star Games for the Sonics.  Cursed, I say.  Cursed.
• Bill Wennington.  Wennington, Schrempf and Uwe Blab were all drafted in the 1985 draft (the White-Out).  Wennington was best known for waving a towel on the end of the bench.  Seriously.  You could look it up.  Owns two rings for waving towels with the Jordan-era Bulls.
• Uwe Blab.  This just as easily could have been “The Curse 0f Uwe Blab.”  Averaged two points a game and led the league in slow for five years.  And the Mavericks passed up on Joe Dumars in that draft to get these two stiffs.
• Jim Farmer.  The shortest player on this list (unless you want to count Steve Alford, taken in the second round that same year).  That’s not a compliment.  Started one game his entire career.  And the Mavs could have taken Reggie Lewis.
• Cherokee Parks.  Wikipedia says he was noted for his tattoos and his laid-back nature.  I guess “laid-back nature” is a euphemism for “being clinically dead”.
• Wang Zhizhi.  An honorary white guy for the purposes of this argument.  Scored more points per game than Uwe Blab, though.
• Eduardo Najera.  No jokes from me; I’ve liked Najera since he was in college.  In fact, he shouldn’t be on this list at all.  Let’s just move on.
• Mladen Sekularac. The Mavs’ only pick in 2003.  He won the Belgian title last year for the Antwerp Giants, so good for him.  Never played a second in the Association.

Okay, I know what you smartasses are thinking.  I forgot someone.  And I did.  Pavel Podkolzin, the big Russian, seven-five, played in six games.  But he was drafted by the Rockets and traded to the Mavericks, so he doesn’t count.

So there.  I have proved my point, I think.

(Oh, yeah, Nowitzki, but he was drafted by the Bucks and traded to the Mavericks, so he doesn’t count, either.  You hear me?  He doesn’t count.)

You must — seriously — you must read this account from my friend who blogs at Crazy Mokes.  You know how hard it is to give a cat a bath, right?  That’s for pikers.  Try putting eye drops into active toddlers sometime:

Much like sleeping, eating and pooping, there is nothing, NOTHING you can do to make your child open his or her eye. If they decide to screw their eyes closed, you are screwed. Totally and completely screwed. And attempting to wrench someone’s eyes open long enough to drop in some eye drops will NOT be the most pleasant experience in the world.

Read the whole thing (and I don’t say that lightly).

To quote the great Fred Kwan, “Sometimes, it’s the little things you treasure.”

Look, don’t expect me to feel sorry for the Japanese.  I get that the new limits on tuna harvesting are having a disastrous impact on the sushi business.  The NYT tells us that it’s like baseball without hot dogs or Texas without barbecue, so I understand — but I don’t sympathize.  Raw tuna is for cats.  You can take your sushi and do whatever you want with it as long as you don’t put it on my plate — and if you do, you’d better dip it in cornmeal batter and deep-fry it first.  I don’t eat sushi — I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it.

But I like this idea:

The restaurant’s owner, Shigekazu Ozoe, 56, said the current situation reminded him of the last time he had no tuna to sell — in 1973, during a scare over mercury poisoning in oceans when customers refused to buy it. At that time, he tried to find other red-colored substitutes like smoked deer meat and raw horse, a local delicacy in some parts of Japan.

“We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good,” he recalled. “It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell.”

If worse comes to worst, he said, he could always try horse and deer again.

Now, I can’t speak for the horse people; they are probably going to be shocked over this.  Horse people don’t like you eating their friends.  But deer?

Let me tell you something, Mr. Ozoe.  Come on over to New Jersey.  We’ve got more deer than you can shake a stick at.  Come on over and take all you want and chop them up for sushi.  You will automatically be the most popular person in New Jersey this side of ex-Governor Codey and the guy in the Members Only jacket.  Get rid of them.

You know what else I hear tastes good?  Bear sushi.  We have them, too.  More people like the bear than like the deer, but I bet you we could work something out.

Sunday night, a day in the life.  One of the few really depressing things about minor-league baseball is how it reduces ordinary middle-class New Jerseyans to the level of beggars in Calcutta.  All you have to do is put some unpaid interns out on the field with a slingshot and some Hanes Beefy-Ts with the local team’s logo silk-screened on them and — pow — the normally-sensible people around you erupt in a frenzy of me me me me me fling it to me.  And you all of a sudden have to be careful, because nobody wants to die as the result of an errant T-shirt.

And so it was last night.  Two rows in front of us, and there were these three hefty middle-aged beer-swilling louts, and they wanted a baseball.  And they weren’t getting one.  There weren’t any foul balls hit in our direction.  That left two sources for balls.  There was the visiting Camden RiverSharks, and they were directing any balls they had towards the Little League group sitting behind the dugout.  And then there was the local ball boy, who — as a matter of principle — never tosses anybody any balls.  He just doesn’t.  It’s not his job.

About the fourth or fifth time the ball boy blew off the idjits, they started getting wise.  So every time he passed by, they started to erupt in sarcastic applause.  “Hey, ball boy, you’re doing a heckuva job,” etc.  This was maybe a tiny bit cute the first time they did it; not so much after several idiotic repetitions.  And the game ended (the good guys won, 4-0) and still, nobody tossed these guys a baseball.  They were ticked.

The ball boy came over for the last time, and the lead heckler went over to take one last shot at him.  And the ball boy tossed him something, white and flashing in the evening air.  It was a baseball.  But it wasn’t just any baseball.  It was a tiny little foam baseball, a toy, what you’d put in a baby’s crib.

It was a great comeback, and I can’t describe how pleased I was.  Of course, it was wasted on the idjits, but the really great comebacks usually are.

Grand Prairie, Texas:  soon to be the world’s capital for blowing stuff up real good.  (No word on whether UTA will require vandalism and arson convictions as a prerequisite for employment, or whether you just need to show you’ve dropped out of South Grand Prairie High.)

I am not going to make fun of the people in the New York Times story on dumpster diving – not dumpster diving due to imminent starvation or privation, but dumpster diving as an avocation:

…the small but growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.org, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

Make fun of them?  Perish the thought.  This is a free country, man.  That means that these “freegans” are free to spend their time rooting through New York dumpsters for half-eaten jars of peanut butter if that’s what they want to do.  They really are.  Now, this doesn’t stop me from pointing out that buying a nice, new jar of peanut butter is $2.39 or so (or a dollar-fifty, if you’re not picky about eating generic peanut butter, and if you’re eating it out of the dumpster, you cannot be that picky).  I am not going to point out that $2.39 is about what a “freegan” can make from a half-hour of dull-but-air conditioned “honest” work, like busing tables or delivering Indian take-out or doing the inventory of patchouli oil and sunflower seeds at the health-food store.  That doesn’t matter.  This is America.  If white middle-class New Yorkers want to spend their free time — and these people appear to have way, way too much free time — living like filthy bums and eating discarded organic veggie fries out of some trash bin, well, that is their Constitutional right.  I would never dream of making fun of these people.  Their position in society is just as valuable as mine; their vote counts just as much.  (It’s not my fault that Republicans continually outpoll the Socialist Workers Party, even in off-years.)

No.  I will not make fun of them.  (And on one level, I can’t, not as long as there’s that microwave cart sitting in my storage facility that I got from out front of a dumpster in Austin back when I was an impoverished law student.)  I will not even try to cheer myself up by telling myself on days when I’m depressed, well, at least you’re not squatting in some loft in SoHo, wearing hand-me-down Birkenstocks, sleeping on carpet remnants, and drinking soy milk that’s three days past its expiration date.  It would be wrong.

But I will make fun of the New York Times, because, let’s face it, I’m a right-wing blogger, and that is what I do. 

Here’s the thing.  Under normal conditions, certis paribus, a story about Manhattan neo-hippies eating spoiled fruit out of dumpsters and begging for scraps is completely non-newsworthy.  Who cares?  Well, the only reason that the New York Times cares is because this particular breed of work-shy urban hoboes is motivated by leftist, anti-corporate sentiments.  (Big shock.)

Still, like most freegans, she seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have to take trees from the forest.”

I am waiting with bated breath for the New York Times to announce that they are going to start printing their newspapers on carpet remnants.  And:

That year, while demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”

After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and freeganism.

This, I fear, is the message that the New York Times is trying to get across.  If you have politically-correct opinions, you can do anything and be celebrated for it.  If you’re against the war in Iraq, it’s okay — it’s admirable! — to quit your job and spend your days scavenging for free-range chicken nuggets.  If you have even the vaguest pro-environmental sentiments, it’s laudable to spend all day long picking garbage instead of, you know, having a job and earning a salary.

Here’s the thing.  We all know that one of the big problems with institutionalized liberalism is that there are “no enemies on the left” — that as long as Hugo Chavez, let’s say, keeps saying that GWB is a bad guy, it’s okay for him to imprison his political rivals and shut down opposition media outlets.  Fidel Castro can jail all the librarians and dissidents he wants as long as he’s available to schmooze Michael Moore when he’s in town.  Write one poem saying America is bad, and you go from being an imprisoned enemy combatant terrorist to having your work put out there by the University of Iowa Press.  Everyone should be familiar with this sort of thing by now.

Okay, so having “defined deviancy down” for overseas dictators, the New York Times is doing the same for filthy hippies.  Basically, the rule is — correct me if I’m wrong — you can do whatever the hell you want to do as long as you hate George W. Bush enough.  Want to run around naked?  As long as you have a “Chimpy McHitler” sign on you, you’re okay — not just okay, but protected by the First Amendment.  (You could even take a whiz in the gutter because it wastes less water that way.)  Want to spend your life eating garbage and running a website out of your parents’ basement?  As long as you hate Halliburton enough, that’s cool — not just cool, but admirable.  Want to raise money for “poverty” and then spend a good chunk of it on your own personal travel and making sure the staff for your 2008 campaign have jobs and don’t have to eat out of dumpsters for two years?  Hey, we’re all friends here.

The worst part of this is that I don’t see where the limit is.  Want to throw puppies off of high-rise buildings?  If you can convince a gullible reporter that you’re doing it as a protest of tobacco companies, I bet you could throw a three-day-old golden retriever puppy out of a sixth-story window and get a positive write-up.  (Not that I am advocating such a thing, but you could.)   Arson?  Murder?  Hey, the New York Times has a fetish for the Weathermen, so you never know.

UPDATE:  Apparently, it’s even okay to be Ann Coulter, as long as you call GWB silly names.

(It goes without saying that the opposite is true — if you’re a Republican, and you do something innocuous like wearing a silver ring with a Bible verse engraved on it, or wearing socks with sandals, you could very likely wind up condemned as a warmongering fascist by Paul Krugman.)

It’s still a free country, and the New York Times is still well within its rights to hold up feckless hippie freeloaders as paragons of virtue if it wants to do that.  After all, everybody’s gotta eat.

I was right!

I don’t know for sure, mind you, and I can’t tell you for absolutely certain, but if history teaches us anything, is that it’s very hard to get through a national Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting without somebody saying something really, really stupid. 

I could have been even more accurate; I could have said that it’s hard to get through an annual meeting without Paige Patterson saying something really, really stupid.  Because — predictably — that’s what happened:

Christian homemaking will save the Southern Baptist Convention and the nation, according to the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, one of the nation’s largest training schools for pastors.

Paige Patterson announced at the SBC meeting in San Antonio that his school was offering an academic program to train women how to make a Christian home.

Yes, there is evidently a Christian way for wives to water houseplants, wash clothes, warm leftovers and wax floors.

Oh, it gets better:

The so-called cultural crisis apparently necessitated the seminary’s program which will require 23 hours of course work, including seven hours of “design and apparel” with a lab for clothing construction. Another seven hours of course study covers meal preparation and nutrition.

The three-hour course on the biblical model for the family did not disclose whether polygamy, a commonly accepted Old Testament practice, was encouraged.

Since the seminary’s only female faculty member is the president’s wife, who wears hats to symbolize her subservience to her husband, she may be the program’s primary instructor for classes that start in the fall.

Okay, I admit, the polygamy comment was unfair.  But the rest of it?  The article goes on to quote a conservative pastor as saying that he “nearly shot Diet Coke out my nose” when he heard about it, because it’s just that stupid.

Besides — as Paige Patterson could probably tell you, if he wasn’t too busy making his wife wear hats and refinish the floors and mow the yard – the Author and Founder of Our Faith said exactly one thing about housework during his entire Earthly ministry (Luke 10:38-42, KJV):

Now it came to pass, as they went, that [Jesus] entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house.
And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word.
But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.
And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:
But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

What’s Jesus saying here?  Relax; there are things that are more important than housework.  And so I say to Paige Patterson, relax, there are things more important than worrying about who is doing what chore in the house.  Like, let’s say, not making the entire Southern Baptist Convention look like a pack of sexist idiots.