too much brainpower - gravity affected

was dorking out and looking at photos of the great A. Einstein and found this superb photo of the man with Robert Oppenheimer.

In the rarified atmosphere of world-changing physicists and mathematicians, Oppenheimer was a genius among geniuses.

Once, during his lecturing days, Oppenheimer was called out of town for a few weeks. He asked one of his colleagues to cover for him. He told his colleague to teach directly from the textbook, and answer questions as required. Piece of cake.

The colleague arrived to find that the textbook was entirely in Dutch. The colleague told Oppenheimer that he couldn't do it, the book was in Dutch. Oppenheimer replied, "Ahhh, but it's such easy Dutch."

it's good to have the last word

i'm (in)famous for wanting to get the last word on anything. it's an unattractive trait that i wish i managed better.

Speaking of getting the last word (honk!) I recently read an article in Slate about the creator of Baby Enstein, those coma-inducing videos for kids. It was a nice bit of synergy, because it is critical of the Bush administration's education policies (a pet peeve of mine), i'm interested in cognitive psychology, and I enjoy it when popular myths are debunked. This article was the trifecta for me. Plus the subtitle had the word "mountebank" in it. I don't even know what that means and had to look it up. Double bonus.

Turns out that the subject of the article wrote a letter to Slate, and the author wrote a response to her letter. It's a bit unfair, because the author gets the last word, but the response is measured and intelligent. Even as he hands out verbal beatdown. In a numbered list, no less. Enjoy.

injury to leg: mild; injury to pride: severe

A moments inattention at the gym can be the source of some entertainment. This time, it was me.

I was lifting one of the bars w/ fixed weights on the end. Shocking the triceps with some skull crushers. Between sets, i got up and put the dumbell down on the bench I was laying on, made sure it wasn't going to roll off. As I was standing there, gossiping (as you do), it rolled off. On the way to the ground, it ran down the front of my shin, from my knee to my ankle. It looked, and sounded, unpleasant. It so happened that the grippy part of the bar scraped down my shin. I had to wipe my flesh off the bar. (not superb) Fortunately the injury looked a lot worse than it was, and although my workout ended early, i was back in the gym the next day. As it is, i have a sweet bit of road rash down the front of my leg. Which I got at the weight room. Because I am a toolbox. I'd post a picture but it's kind of icky. But also funny.

This embarassing episode got me thinking about some other stuff I've done that, in retrospect, I probably could have handled better. I'm not talking about momentary lapses in judgment (plenty of those), I'm talking about pre-meditated inadequacy on a grand scale. So in the next week or so I'll post at least one blog entry to highlight some of those instances. Not too many, because I've blocked them from my memory by now. Thank God.

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in other news, the movie "Smoking Aces" is not that bad. But it's not that good, either.

sexy new look, same dumb commentary

Updated the blog with a new template and some custom colors. The craptop i'm doing the edits on does not show color accurately, so if you're seeing something that looks awful, please let me know. I won't get a chance to check it on a good monitor for a couple days.

Commentary is unchanged. Except I'm now funnier than ever before.

in case you were wondering what awesome looks like...

ordered my new guitar from the guy that knows the guy that knows the guy. (really, that many people were involved - it's not easy to get a deal these days.) problem is, the Les Paul Classic in "vintage sunburst" is backordered two or three months. options: get a different color (shut your mouth) or get a different guitar (i will punch you in the groin if you keep talking this jibber jabber). all i can do is put down a desposit and wait my turn.

upside: gives me plenty of time to, umm, how do i put this? plenty of time to LEARN HOW TO PLAY GUITAR. yeah. I said it. by the time i lay hands on this baby I'll have three chords and the truth. prepare yourself.

"don't be intimidated, this happens all the time. well, maybe not all the time. but you're not the first."

You may or may not have heard that I am shopping for a new electric guitar. I have been hesitant to go in and actually try playing any of the possible models, mostly because I don't know how to play. What I do know how to play is all acoustic. So I don't want to go in and embarass myself at the local Guitar Center. It's very catch-22: you can't learn to play an electric until you get one, and you can't know how to choose an electric until you know how to play it. Something's gotta give. Which brought me to the local Guitar Center right at the opening bell on Saturday morning. I was hoping for fewer customers, an amp to myself, etc. I even brought a list of the guitars I wanted to hear. (Note also that I was told that to truly test an electric you should play it "very loud" through the amp. Perfect.)

Unfortunately, few customers means a very, very attentive sales staff. There isn't much opportunity to do any unobserved solo "jamming". If I could "jam". Which I cannot. My guitar inadequacy is usually only exposed to my empty room, and that's the way I like it; I try not to broadcast. So I get set up, start reviewing one of my options, and it's going fine. I set option 1 aside, and proceed to option two. As I'm sitting there, wondering what the f*ck I'm doing and sweating (profusely) with embarassment, a kid walks over and politely asks if he can "check out" the Les Paul Studio I just set aside. I say of course. Kid, 11 years old if he's a day, takes the LP Studio to the end of the row, plugs in, and starts to EFFING RIPSHRED. I mean he is killing it. He's not playing super-hard guitar parts, but he's playing some decent lead metal guitar. Sitting next to me he sounds like Steve Vai. I almost threw in the towel right then and there. But I swallowed my pride and chuckled at myself. It was good for me. God humbles the proud.

i am looking forward to playing electric guitar in the privacy of my own home. with headphones on.
okay then.

multicultural magic

I don't know how to describe this video except to say that it is outstanding. I found it here.
You owe it to yourself to watch through the full rendition of "by the rivers of babylon." beyond that is a lot to ask.

lalas puts down blunt, talks out of ass

Alexei Lalas (pictured at left), whom you might remember as that red-headed, long haired, goateed, hippy clown from US Soccer 10 years ago, is now the GM of the LA Galaxy. As such, he is gifted in the double-talk and ambiguities you expect from an executive in the "entertainment" business in LA. I don't know if all those years of smoking weed* have gone to his head, but he's also prone to making stuff up. Like in this recent interview with a guy from Sports Illustrated. The article is titled "Lalas goes ga-ga". Appropriate. Here are some excerpts of the ga-ga ness, with my comments. Alexei's words are in bold.

This is a watershed moment for the Los Angeles Galaxy, for Major League Soccer and for the sport of soccer.

true; kind of true if you say so; and maybe true in a signed-a-faded-star-for-his-retirement sort of way.

I think that we will certainly look back at this day and recognize the significance in terms of the growth of soccer.

You sold only 2,000 tickets. In an urban area that has 8 million people. With no american football team. Let's not get carried away.

my bad, by all means, get carried away.

We talk about these big-picture things and they're all very important, but what tends to get lost, and understandably so at times when you're talking about David Beckham, who is this world wide icon, is how good a soccer player he is. Ultimately that's what it all comes down to. He's going to make us a better soccer team.

Pay attention to this part where he says it's about making us a better soccer team. We will come back to it later because it is a) marginally true overall that Beckham makes them better, because the Galaxy are crap (not because Beckham is good), and b) COMPLETE BULLSHIT THAT IT'S ABOUT MAKING THEM A BETTER TEAM. It's about marketing and branding and blah blah blah.

We not only want to be the premier club in the United States, but we want to be considered one of the premier clubs in the world, and in order to do that you have to make bold statements and do bold things, and you can't get any bigger or bolder than what we did.

I applaud the ambition to be one of the premier clubs in the world. Unfortunately, there are some other clubs that have a head start. Like two of your new guy's former teams, Manchester United and Real Madrid. Real Madrid have won their own domestic trophy 25 times. They are like the Yankees of Spanish football. except their games draw 100,000 people. As for getting bigger and bolder, that same Real Madrid team used a similar philosophy and started signing all the big stars several years ago. It nearly bankrupted the club, and once the stars got old, they stopped winning. Which is why they are unloading them to shite teams in Qatar and, ummm, LA. Describing the impact of signing Beckham, he says:

...it raises an incredible amount of attention and awareness of the Los Angeles Galaxy and Major League Soccer.

True. But I thought this was about making your team better?

It is a player who is in his prime at 31 years old, who has played for two of the best clubs in the world in Manchester United and Real Madrid and now is going to what we feel is one of the other great clubs in the world.

Whoa there, Lex! Slow your roll! If by "in his prime" you mean "fired by his own national team" and "unable to make it into the first team on his current club" then yeah, he's in his prime all right. The fact that you feel the LA Galaxy is one of the "other great clubs in the world" says a lot about your tenuous grip on reality.

He is a presence on and off the field, he is known throughout the world; and let's be honest, there are teams all over the world that would love to have David Beckham and he has chosen to come to the United States and has chosen to come to come to the Los Angeles Galaxy. That means a lot and that says a lot to the soccer community in the United States, and even more to the soccer community internationally.

If this is about making your team better, why are we talking about a player's presence off the field? Because this is about publicity and market share and everything BUT making your team better. What Beckham coming to the US says is that he is too prideful to play for a second or third-tier club in England and he can get more money here. Because he is not very good any more.

They all know he's great player and when the ball is thrown out and people start playing soccer, I expect to see all the players step it up a level. That's what happens when big timers come into the mix. You want to impress. You want to do well. Not only will he raise the level of players on our team but I also think he will raise the level of play of other teams. I mean, who doesn't want to beat the team that David Beckham's on?

Ahh... It turns out that the MLS players were not reaching their potential because Beckham wasn't there. They must have been holding something in reserve. They must have not wanted to do well before he got here. When he gets here, look out! People will want to do well like never before. Opposing teams will also play better, because they didn't have enough incentive before. That silly idea of "winning" is not as good as "beating Beckham".

[SI interviewer shits the bed here and draws analogy to ARod, which is ridiculous because baseball is a much different type of game and also because ARod is one of the top 5 best players on the planet at any position. Beckham is not one of the top 10 midfielders, never mind players.]

As far as the Galaxy brand, I can tell you that in the past 24 hours, what we've seen in terms of the attention and the interest domestically and internationally has been unlike anything we've ever seen, and that's the type of impact that David Beckham has.

I thought this was about making your team better? Wait, what? It's about selling jerseys and market share and promotion and attention and "interest"? Weird. i never would have guessed that.
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* I made up that part about smoking weed. Because it is funny to me. And he looks like the sort of guy that would smoke a lot of weed. But I made it up. Even if it is true. Which it isn't.

back, and better than ever! (kind of)

it's been a tough couple of weeks for the fat kid. the flights home from south america were long and miserable. took about 24 hours, 19 hours of flight time. by the time i got back i was not feeling too hot. and of course i got sick as soon as i got home. as per usual. still, it was great to be home. i even went to the gym a couple times before i got REALLY sick. awesome.

best part about being home: seeing my peeps.

reason i came home (long version): i was sitting on a beach in Isla de Santa Catarina in southern brazil, and I realized that traveling solo was not my idea of fun. If i don't have someone to help put the experience in context then the experience itself doesn't mean very much. that's just how i am. i didn't see the point in continuing my vacation. so i came home.

in other news, David Beckham signed with the LA Galaxy! People don't realize how not good he is (got fired from his own national team, can't make it into the squad for his club team) and they grossly overestimate his ability to make an impact on the field. You have to divide any marquee player's impact by the total number of other players on his own team (except in baseball, where one guy bats and blah blah blah - baseball sucks). So if you add one mediocre player to a team of other mediocre players, what do you get? well, you get me ignoring the games for what would be my "home club". Somebody asked The Game what he thought of the move (this is a guy w/ the LA Dodgers symbol tattooed on his face), and he had the right attitude. He says, in part, "I'd kick David Beckham's ass on any given day." As you should, Mr. Game. As you should.

Why the guitar photo at top? i am shopping for a new electric, and considering this make and model. it was the only photo i had on short notice. awesome!
thanks for reading.