Tom Delay is Innocent!!!

A District Attorney could indict a ham sandwich for
conspiracy to create indigestion.



Thank you, thank you.. I'll be here all day. I also do
weddings and Bar mitzvahs

(on a serious note, Tom, doesn't it stink not to have all
the people who interpret and enforce the rules on your
side? Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and those federal
judges sure were helpful with your redistricting of the state,
this is not. Karma can be a bitch!!)

Big Trouble In Fantasyland

My fantasy team is on the fast track to becoming the LA Clippers
of its league. The streak of bad luck and ill fortune is mind-boggling,
and hopefully humorous to those of you who follow this stuff.
Where to start?

(1) Lets start with one of my top receivers, Laveranues Coles of the
NY Jets. Yesterday, the Jets lost not one, but two, quarterbacks to
the same shoulder injury. Now some dude named Brooks Bollinger
with 9 career passes under is belt is going to be heaving the rock
downfield. This should work out well.

(2) Unfortunately, I didn't get the memo that Tony Dungy was
transforming the high octane, high flying, high scoring Colts into
the Washington Redskins, and that Peyton Manning's role would
change from tossing about 50 TDs to something more on the order
of 15. Don't make me turn on my own players, Tony. Don't make me
curse you and take great pleasure in the Pats blowing out your squad
in January in the same fashion as the past two seasons.

(3) Jamal Lewis. Not so much the "gaining yards on carries" back
anymore

What else? Issac Bruce: Turf Toe Mike Anderson: Bum ribs, now in
RBBC system DeShuan Foster: Still floundering behind Stephen Davis.
Eric Moulds: Buffalo QB couldn't toss the ball into Lake Erie

Yeah, its only week 3, but I'm officially hitting the panic button.

Bright spot: Chad Johnson. That guy's bad. If anyone can explain
his touchdown 'jig' at Chicago, I'd be interested to hear it.

Laugh at me! Laugh!!!

On Paranoia:

OK, hosted a party this weekend, and overheard yet another
conversation about how employers are googling your ass before
even looking over your resume. I am now officially paranoid
and overreacting to the infinitely small chance that someone
out there is thinking about hiring me, and then finding my
sometimes potty mouthed with the occasional drug reference
and acutely antidisestablishmentarian blog and changing their
mind. So for the next couple months I post under a pen name.
The prospective employer with keen powers of perception might
be able to see right through the foil, but if I have profoundly
confused them for at least a moment, all is not lost. After
employment (or reckoning with stupid behavior), I will go back to
the "real name" (which is Kevin Daniels, but don't tell).
If the blog does me in at that point, its lawsuit time, baby!
I'm sure I'm much better off now through the act of typing that
last sentence.

On Movies, again:

Last night "JL" and I went to see The Constant Gardener. JL and I
have this running joke about movies that make for good or bad "first
date" movies. Gardener is not a good first date movie. As my yet
to be discovered in a big way friend Bill Hickey up in Boston would
say, its really quite the 'time to fill up the bathtub' film.
If you catch the drift. Anyway, while the movie is certainly not
flawless, I'd say it is a must-see for its powerful immersion of the
viewer into a world of have-nots and explication of how Western
influence (forgetting, temporarily, however slanted, skewed,
apocryphal or fictional Le Carre and Meirelle's rendering happens
to be) can be exploitative and corrupting to those countries and
communities, and the extent to which 1st world nations are extremely
privileged in their access to wealth and medical science and
technology. The powers that be, "The Man" as it were, want people
watching non-thinking or consumption-oriented things like Taco Bell
ads or baseball games or Greta Van Susteren. The Constant Gardener
is WAY on the other end of the spectrum, and should be lauded and
seen for its extreme dissent of image and narrative.

On Ohio Football:

Has there been as much excitement since the days of Icky Icky
Boom Boom? Forget OU's acquisition of Frank Solich, which was like
Athens getting Lee Iacocca to run the University or Fiorello LaGuardia
to serve as Mayor... how bout' them Bengals! I love having Chad
Johnson on my fantasy football team. NFL games start at 1:07 ET,
and you know its going to be a good day when Chad grabs a 70 yard
TD reception at 1:08 as he did yesterday. Sure, T.O. had the better
line at the end of the day, but he's also a gigantic headcase and went
up against a 49ers secondary that couldn't catch a cab on Broadway
and 42nd. Bad news for the Bengals is that they're in the AFC, and
will probably need at least 10 wins to make the playoffs, but its
looking like Marvin Lewis, Johnson, the two Palmers, and a decent
D will get them there. (not that the folks in the Cincinnati suburbs,
who keep electing the wrong people at all sorts of different
governmental levels deserve this, but)

At any rate, who's got my T.J. Houshmandzadeh jersey???

Overrated Movies: Now We're Talkin'!!!!!

The September issue of Premiere runs its list of the 20 most
overrated movies of all time. Their list, which they run in
alphabetical order:

2001
A Beautiful Mind
American Beauty
An American in Paris
Chariots of Fire
Chicago
Clerks
Easy Rider
Fantasia
Forrest Gump
Field of Dreams
Gone with the Wind
Good Will Hunting
Jules and Jim
Monster's Ball
Moonstruck
Mystic River
Nashville
The Red Shoes
The Wizard of Oz

By and large, I issue a vociferous Halleluiah! in response to
Premiere's list. There's nothing that rubs me the wrong way quite
like a barrage of sappy and sycophantic praise for a crappy film,
and the Academy subsequently showering the film with Oscars to the
detriment of a much more deserving and extraordinary piece of Art.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen a number of the above films, and I
adamantly contest the presence of 'Oz' on this list. That just ain't
right. I offer a few comments on this group. I look forward to
reading some of yours...

2001: Anytime it becomes popular to mute a movie, smoke a truck
bed full of marijuana, and throw on a Pink Floyd album to enhance
one's viewing pleasure of the film, that means we can pretty safely
assume the film was either A) pretty exciting as-is or B) pretty
hapless and mind numbingly boring as-is. As much as I love, adore,
cherish other Kubrick films, 2001 falls solidly in the "B" category
for me on this one.

American Beauty: This might be my A#1 over-rated film of all time.
I'd rank it pretty low as an after school Hallmark special, but as it
won Best Picture, well, you've got to be kidding. In a nutshell:
Just because you empathized deeply with a sucky and solipsistic film,
that doesn't mean the film was good, it might just mean, well. . . . .

Clerks: Not a bad film, mind you, but on multiple occasions I've
avidly watched people watching Clerks for the Nth time with giddy
excitement and thought, you can't possibly be having as much fun
right now as you're letting on... Really. I could sit down and
watch with you or I could go outside and clean out the gutters or
wax the car. Just about as stimulating.

Forrest Gump: Catchy! Lots of catchy phrases! Tom Hanks showing
his depth by proving that it wasn't only Leo DiCaprio in Gilbert's
Grape who can play a guy with a developmental disability. Robert
Zemeckis pouring on the sentimentality real think and heavy. What
really hurt with this film was that it beat out Shawshank Redemption
and Pulp Fiction for Best Picture. Together, these films are about
394 to the power of 698 times better than Gump. You disagree?
Meet me in the parking lot at 4:00. Which lot? I dunno. Pick one.
No brass knuckles, no fish hooking, no rabbit punching. Other than
that, its no holds barred.

Mystic River: This was a truly great film, save for the fact that about
half the characters and nearly all of the plot twists were completely
f**king contrived ... other than that, we're on solid ground here.

Monster's Ball: I'm not going to write that Halle Berry couldn't act
her way out of a paper bag, but Halle Berry couldn't act her way out
of a paper bag. As Walter from The Big Lebowski might say,
"Catwoman dude, Catwoman."

Maybe I'll blog about my additions to the list (Ahem.. The English
Patient, anyone??) or the most under-rated movies of all time (Like,
Peter Weir getting nominated for Best Director for The Truman Show,
while Joel Coen wasn't nominated for Lebowski. Someone please
explain that one to me)... but Premiere's list warrants some
discussion unto itself. Until next time...

Memo to Mike Anderson: Suck It Up

Some miscellaneousageness...

On Fantasy Football, Week 1:

Not so hot, thanks to the RB core. Jamal Lewis was largely
ineffectual against the COLTS D (good sign, there.. my buddy
John F. joked that perhaps he needed some more time to work out
in the yard), but the real stinker was Mike Anderson of the
Denver Broncos. The story is the guy hasn't had a solid season
since 01' but made a real effort in pre-season and was impressive
enough to win the starting job. However, after four carries
against the Miami Dolphins he decided that a dinged up rib was
enough to call it a day. What a hero. Byron Leftwich won a
game for Marshall with a broken leg where his O line had to
carry him to the line of scrimmage. Welcome to the NFL, buddy.
Its a collision sport. Maybe you should try your hand at
shuffle board.

At any rate... pulled young Pittsburgh phenom Willie Parker off
the wire, he should deliver some solid numbers as long as
Staley and the Bus are incapacitated.

On Television:

Did I mention that my new favorite show is HBO's Entourage,
(though, I don't currently have cable, so there isn't much
competition.. you can read between the lines on that one if
you'd like) and if Jeremy Piven doesn't get an Emmy for
his role as Ari, there is no justice in the world? I think
I may have. However, as I am still gainfully unemployed, I
am quickly running out of unseen episodes. The good news is
that the show has been renewed for a 3rd season. Seriously,
you can jump in this series at pretty much any point, and if
you haven't seen Episodes 17 "I Love You Too" and 18 "The
Batmitzvah" I highly recommend those gems to get you started
down the road to blissful addiction. Good to know that HBO
can put together a quality series from time to time, cus
97% of the rest stuff out there is complete and total garbage.
But I wouldn't really know that because I don't have cable.

On Presidential War Powers:

A real problem for Democracy In America that is gettin' some much
needed attention. I intend to read or pick through a new book
on the subject by Peter Irons entitled, "How The Imperial Presidency
Hijacked the Constitution" but don't intend to learn too much or
disagree with anything. Funny how it works.. we certainly have a lot
of gridlock in Washington, but when checks and balances ain't
working, bad things tend to happen. The Legislature's unchecked
encroachment on the Judicial Branch via mandatory sentencing has
spawned the world's largest prison population and an endless sea
of crappy crime dramas on TV (there is a parabolic connection of
a sort, just stay with me...); the Executive's unchecked usurping
of the de facto power to start and end wars has delivered our
country absolute train wrecks of foreign policy including Vietnam,
Iran Contra, and Gulf War II. This shit needs to stop. I was
thrilled to see Senator Lahey of Vermont lead off his questioning
of Roberts today with this exact issue. I'll blog about it some
other time, but I think one solution is, perhaps, that the Armed
Forces Generals cast an anonymous vote, promulgated to the people,
on whether they support a President's decision to go to war.
No, its not crazy. It has its has merits. At Syracuse, I was
going to put the question to an ex-4 Star, but ended up asking
some PM Question Hour type "Question" which just trashed W and
Rumsfeld. And believe you me, worked like a charm. I think I
almost had the guy in tears. At any rate, let me try to get around
to fleshing this one out sometime later in the week... I think I
can find a couple holes in my schedule.

On Music:

One thing that's pretty gosh darned swell about living in the
NYC is that, if you want to hear a band live, its not a question
of whether that's gonna happen this year, but what venue they're
playing in the next month or so. Last Thursday and Saturday I
caught a couple bands I've been meaning to see for a while, and
will now comment on those groups as well as their openers...

Dr. Uhaul-- Opened up for Tea Leaf at The Knitting Factory.
Talented group, but serving up your standard white bread jam,
nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary. But man oh man,
do these guys have some of the best groupie/promoters in the
business. A few gals were going around with sign up sheets and
flyers.. if you didn't give them your hotmail address or promise
to attend the next show in the East Village it appeared they
were going to stomp your ass (politely) right on the spot.

Drums and Tuba-- Opened for Benevento at Bowery. Good stuff.
The tuba largely substitutes for a bass guitar, but I really liked
how they had it miked and how the tubaist (?) was able to work
some wicked sounds out of the thing. I've always thought that--
though indispensable--the bass guitar is too limited. Guys
like Les Claypool and Victor Wooten distinguish themselves by
essentially playing the guitar melody or by busting out a
sublime Tchaikovsky solo in the middle of some standard rock
song. The tuba carried the baseline well but also added a unique
richness to the sound. My only gripe is.. they brought out a
very capable sax player for the second song, which was stellar,
and then sent him packing backstage. Personally, I think that
brass always makes the 3 or 4 piece rock group better, and it
pains me to hear a group rock out with brass, and then have to
readjust to their sound without it. I swear to God, I have a Phish
bootleg from 91' where they are playing some po dunk festival
in upstate New York, and they do this 25 minute Mikes Song-->
H2-->Weekapaug Groove with the Giant Country Horns, and it is the
absolute greatest music I've ever heard. And I'm not kidding. While
I'm excited that I caught Phish with B.B. King and friggen
Jay Z, I'm profoundly disappointed that they didn't tour with
brass more, and that I never heard them with Carl Gearhart or
Tower of Power at the 15 or so concerts I attended. At any rate,
I digress. Apparently D&T has been around for a decade, and I
hope they are finally getting some well deserved attention. The
New Yorker had a very nice write up on them this week and plug
for their show at The Pit in Red Hook.

The Benevento Russo Duo-- Uhh... yeah, they were pretty spiffy
and had a neat sound. Two guys, a drummer and a keyboard player.
The drummer plays along with drum sound effects from a computer,
but he's solid on the real instruments and rocks with a Keith
Moon type intensity. The keyboard player compliments him well and it
makes for a steady barrage of amenable rocky-jam sound. My
only complaint here is that sometimes the keyboard player would
get real scaled back and minimalist and pay more attention to
nifty sounding effects and the sound would begin to boarder on
techno. On the whole, though, a group worth seeing. I'd be
interested to hear them groove out with Mike Gorden or Charlie
Hunter or whoever.

Tea Leaf Green-- Now, here's a super-talented band with a great
sound capable of putting on a powerful three or four hour concert.
Maybe all that's missing is better management. After being blown
away with them on Sat. night I went hunting for their most
recent album and couldn't find it among the biggest, most
inventory-laden music stores in Manhattan, and if you're not going
to find something there, well... ended up buying online and its
shipping from Oregon. Someone needs to be working much harder to
get the word out about this group. Without saying too much, if
you have the opportunity, you should check them out. Unless your
thing is Kabuki theater or country music, in which case I'm really
surprised your reading this. Most fun of my Saturday night was
when the group of 3 guys I was with at the concert conspired to lie
to the above mentioned John F.--who was revved up to see the show
but got called in to bartend--, and convince him at 3:30 am that
Willie Nelson had come on to play the encore, which was comprised
of 'Touch of Grey' and a 20-minute version of 'These Boots Were
Made For Walking'. I think he only bought it for 10 minutes, but
that window of time was solid gold.

Well, this has been a long-arse posting, eh? Thanks for reading.
You stay classy.




Jeremy Piven: A funny, funny, funny man.

(Ladies) and Gentlemen, Start Your Vicarious-Glory Geekwad Testosterone Engines!

Howdy,

Before we get to FANTASY FOOTBALL, a couple notes...

On Katrina:

OK, lets give some massive incompetence and failure points
where they are due: GW completely bungled this one, showing his
complete ineptitude at leading and callous disregard for the
public good. He's a pooper. But don't take my word for it,
as Levar Burton of Reading Rainbow would say, go with the sage
opinion of that liberal firebrand Thomas Friedman at the NY Times
(I'm sure Limbaugh and the rest of the neo-fascist reactionary
conservative radio crowd are singing Bush's praises and blaming
the storm on Jimmy Carter, but when Friedman does such an about
face, it is worth noting):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html?incamp=article_popular_1

On way overdue links of the day:

http://www.windley.com/archives/2003/06/david_weinberg.shtml

On music:

Going to hear Benevento Russo Duo for first time tonight at Bowery
Ballroom, and Tea Leaf Green for the first time on Sat at the Knitting
Factory. Heard good things about both bands. Will report back..


Aiiight, now on to the good stuff. So, I'm a straight male between
the ages of 16 and 38. Not that that matters. As they taught me in
grad school, correlation does not imply causation. Though I'm putting
the correlation between that demographic and playing
FANTASY FOOTBALL at about .97. Yes, my little brother meets the
criteria and doesn't play, but he will once he discovers there's as
much strategy in FF as there is in Civilization III, and my older
brother doesn't play but he may be, on some level, still "figuring
things out."

I'm not gonna blog about how brilliant FF is, or how much fun it is,
you just gotta jump into the pool and find out. So this bit is for
the folks, like my good cousin Matt Otto, who have. Once you do, one
kind of learns to speak a new language. You get my fiancee Jen
together with a handful of her Columbia Law grad buddies, and they
will quickly slip into law speak. I'm gonna be full throttle on the
FF speak for a while now. Without further ado:

This year's team:

QB: Peyton Manning, Drew Brees
RB: Jamal Lewis, Michael Bennett, Mike Anderson, DeShawn Foster,
Michael Pittman
WR: Chad Johnson, Michael Clayton, Laveranues Coles, Issac Bruce
Eric Moulds, Tyrone Calico, Marty Booker
WR/TE: Alge Crumpler
K: Mike Vanderjagt
Def: Pittsburg

(already.. how can't you love a game with names like DeShawn Foster,
Laveranues Coles, and Alge Crumpler???)

Strategery: Grabbed Manning with the #2 pick. My league places
more scoring emphasis on TDs than yardage, but you really can't
lose either way with this regular-season stud. Emphasis on regular
season. If I was picking a playoff roster, I think I'd go with
Jake Plummer before Mr. Indianapolis.

Beyond that.. my feeling was that it'd be wise to spend high picks
on WRs, cus high flying, reliable WRs are hard to come by, they get
injured quite often (picked Steve Smith with #2 or 3 last year,
that was awesome), and many quality RBs would be available in
the late rounds. We'll see if this pays off.. I feel great with
the WRs, but the RB core is a little sketchy. Biggest disappointment
here was magical reappearance of Stephen Davis, who has less
cartilage in his knees than {famous ex-Pop Star} has in his
{work with me here}. Though if he lasts past week 4 I'll be
surprised.. beyond that, Jamal's ankles are weak, I would not hire
Mike Tice to coach my middle school team, Mike Anderson might lose
the Broncos 1500/yd season sweepstakes to Tatum Bell. We'll see.
Any way this plays out, it should be better than last year's fiasco
with picking Clinton Portis with the #3 pick, which torpedoed my
entire season.

HOW GOOFY WILL GUYS GET OVER FF???

Very goofy. I had a couple weeks off last summer.. was in New Haven
and went to a FF clinic at Sports Haven put on by the local paper.
I asked the panel point blank whether Portis would sink or swim and
the Redskins running back from the 88' Superbowl Team and the agent
for Antonio Gates assured me he'd do well under Joe Gibbs.
They were wrong.

Uhh.. so that's enough for now. Last comment: in three seasons I
have not drafted a Bill, more often than not because Mr. Buffalo,
Phil Wittman, grabbed half the team in the first 8 rounds, but this
year, when Moulds was still on the board in like round 6, I felt
compelled. So... lets go Buffalo!

Alright, time to take a break...


After a year living Upstate, Dave finally had to pick a Buffalo Bill

Reflections on a Catastrophe: Long and draftish.

As a recent MPA grad, what I will say definitively is this: Hurricane Katrina is the end all be all greatest case study that Public Administration (which is a solid off-shoot of politics, as politics is borne of philosophy, but that's a separate discussion) in the U.S. has seen: 48 different agencies at 9 governmental and nongovernmental levels, 14 various social problems, and a 200+ year history of urban planning were and are all in play in how this catastrophe has played out.

On the contrary, while it is crystal clear that the government response to Katrina was not what it could or should have been, I will have to reserve judgment and take in more facts, opinions, and accounts before I pass judgment or waive a finger of blame too vigorously at any one politician or group.

In some sense, I think a significant and long standing American habit of mind and way of thinking is at play here: that we are a special or different or God-chosen or generally above the fray people who "bad things," in a sort of collective, apocalyptic way, do not happen too, as they do, with a constant ferociousness, to other people in other parts of the world. This belief has been solidly cemented and reinforced by the advent and domination of the 24-hour image-driven news media. Numerous psychological studies demonstrate that a healthy majority of the American public now base their perceptions on the realities they see on TV more so than realities witnessed elsewhere with their own senses. The overt and muted massage of advertising tells us that as long as we play along with the song and dance of consuming goods and accepting image appropriately, we will be spared from the dreadful and hackneyed fates of this mortal world; not exempting in the least aging, dying, and death.

New Orleans, in a sense, was always a fantasy of sustainable form. Here we have a sinking city, on its one bank the mighty Mississippi, which overran its banks by a distance of some 60 miles in 1927, and on the other bank Lake Pontchartrain, sitting some 14 feet higher than the sea level of the city. The levee system was only "designed" to withstand a Category 3 storm, while only 13 years earlier a Category 5 made landfall on the shores of the same gulf. Whether a man-made levee-- which is commonly beset by failure in floods of lesser magnitude-- can be fully relied upon to endure 160 mile an hour winds and 20 foot storm surge is an important question unto itself. Populations which exist in the path of such tempests live with the risk of their wrath, and New Orleans was no exception, but rather a most poignant rule. Why a massive earthquake in the San Francisco region would be any less devastating, I do not know. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

What has little, if anything, to do with nature, however, was in how this catastrophe played out. It was a tale of two cities. The predominantly white, affluent and mobile population made it out safely while the poor, African American underclass did not. Here, New Orleans is no exception at all. Our society—and particularly our larger cities-- are profoundly segregated by race and class. The dark skinned demographic of Katrina’s victims reflect the colors of our prison population and standing army. Whether American societies’ rife divisions will be diminished or augmented in 100 or 200 years I do not know, but the gap, both real and imagined, between the rich and poor is growing at a steady pace, and the successful integration—in terms of widespread advancement in measures of citizenship and economic prosperity- of our former slave class has never been fully realized or achieved.

9/11 was a failure of imagination, but an excusable one: the horrific and unspeakable means of attacking a civilian population was on a scale the world had not seen… Katrina was not a failure of imagination. She was a very real and plain threat that time would eventually deliver to the city’s doorstep.

What has very much to with imagination are our current President’s justifications for going to war in the Middle East. Here, he is to be faulted for the diversion of the precious resource of our National Guard to foreign soil, and history will judge him unfavorably for that campaign. Whether, in the end, his administration is to be duly faulted, more than any previous administration, for the loss of life caused by this particular catastrophe, I do not know.

The good news is that the task of learning from our peril and mistakes and bad luck in reckoning with nature’s destructive power provide for painful, yet plain and straightforward lessons and instruction for how to avoid future calamity and loss. The bad news, which many commentators have harped upon in recent days, is that natural disaster exposes more than the sheer force of wind, water, earth, and fire. The job of preventing the type of gross abuse of power which perhaps crippled our ability to deal with this very disaster, and of over coming the social divisions which defined its outcome, exist on a much more Herculean scale. Coming to grips with how far our country has yet to come in those arenas might be a necessary first step in making real strides toward their improvement.