In case you haven't heard, the 2004 highschool McDonald's Slam Dunk winner is a 17 year old girl named Candace Parker. She beat five guys to do it.
This past weekend I made a visit to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Pete. I'd been there once before, while I was taking CHOW Art and Music, and went this time because my brother needed to go to some sort of Spanish cultural event for the Spanish class he's taking at the community college.
When most people think of Dali, the first thing that comes to mind are his surrealist works, but interestingly, his surrealist period was relatively short (1929-1939), and from around 1940 to his death in 1989 is considered his classical period. In the end, he gave up on surrealism because he saw it as ultimately meaningless.
It was in fact in the early 1940s that he turned away from the atheism of his father and returned to the faith of his mother, converting to Catholicism. Particularly fascinating is the change in the tone of his work around that time. His earlier surrealist work, while full of symbolism is depressingly empty--the world he depicts is, for lack of a better word, random. His later works, while still being totally his style, have something different in them, something that is difficult to describe except perhaps as a sense of hope. The world of his paintings is no longer random (even the painting which at first seems random is actually ordered around the golden section), there is something guiding the world. A number of his later works involve, in some way, either DNA or an attempt to represent both what we see, and the underlying atomic nature of things. In a quote from the 1950s, Dali said that he saw physics, with the development of things like quantum mechanics, as coming closer than science ever had to proving the existance of God. I find it quite amazing that, after the path that Salvador Dali had taken, that he ended up seeing God in the intricacies of quantum mechanics, where many others look and see randomness.
[as a side note, I think that it's interesting that Dali looked at the theories of modern physics and saw God, while R.C. Sproul spends an entire book (Not a Chance) attempting to debunk modern physics because he sees those same theories as anti-God]
I suppose it's a good thing for her play that the attention is on Michelle Wie, but it seems that no one, outside of my local paper, which has been following Aree Song and her twin sister Naree since they were 11 or 12, has been paying nearly the attention that one would expect when there is a 17 year old LPGA tour rookie in contention for a major championship. Sure, Wie is 2 back, but Song is tied for first, and has an excellent chance of winning since she has played the tournament since she was 13 and has generally done very well. Any other time, a 17 year old who's tied for first would be a huge story, but when you've got a 14 year old two strokes back, then that's your story.
Not that I ever watch golf of any kind, and particularly not the LPGA tour.
My brother is in a country which shall remain unnamed, but where people occasionally eat dogs. My mom asked him whether, if the opportunity presented itself and someone offered him dog, he would eat it so as to avoid being culturally offensive. His response was that he would try dog, and not because of any cultural sensitivity issues, but because he wants to "discover what that species is good for besides sniffing bombs and rescuing mountain climbers."
In case you haven't figured out, he doesn't exactly like dogs.
I love politics. I hate politics. I love the back room wheeling and dealing of politics. I hate the backroom wheeling and dealing of politics. I love game of politics. I hate the game of politics. Enough of that, I think the picture's pretty clear that I have a love/hate relationship with politics. Whatever else is the case, I don't think it's possible to be anywhere near politics and to retain idealism for any period of time. You either get disillusioned and drop out, or you become a cynic. As for me, I'm probably a cynical realist, if that's a possible combination.
I've dabbled in politics for a number of years, was even a precinct committee woman on the county Republican Executive Committee for the year between when I turned 18 and when I left for college (technically, I was an elected official, but only once in a blue moon is it a contested position). My parents have both been on the Executive Committee for 8 or 9 years now, with the exception of the few years where my mom got fed up with everything and she quit. The one particularly useful thing about being on the Executive Committee is that you have connections to the real powerbrokers in the community (especially so if your party is the dominant one), and you get to see the behind the scenes party politics that most people don't even know is going on. That's also kind of the downside, because to some extent it's nice not to know all the messy power plays that are going on. It can be pretty funny to watch the way that people with political ambitions kiss up to the folk that they think could help advance their political careers.
Speaking of behind the scenes politics reminds me of a story from a few years ago that reminds me of precisely the reason that I have a love/hate relationship with politics. Before the election a few years back, there was an open house at the county republican headquarters, which all the local candidates attended, of course. In the course of a conversation with one of the state house candidates, one of my parents asked him his position on abortion (this happens to be a very useful question that can tell you a lot more about the candidate than just his or her position on that particular issue, as you will soon see). This particular candidate took the "personally opposed, but support the woman's right to choose" position, and our attempt to discuss the issue further resulted in the candidate flying off the handle and storming off in anger. When we got home that evening, my mom wrote an e-mail about the encounter, expressing concern that a candidate who loses his temper and flies off the handle when someone disagrees with him would not be very well suited for the office. She sent the e-mail to quite a few people, and it ended up going to one of the school board members (who happened to be running for re-election and had the same campaign manager as the house candidate), and he sent it out to his personal e-mail list. The e-mail ended up getting back to the house candidate, who threw a fit and said it was all lies, and was so mad that he tried to get his campaign manager to quit managing the campaign of the school board candidate. This huge brouhaha was all going on behind the scenes, and since it didn't make it to the press the general public never found out about it, and went to the polls with no clue as to the guy's temper. Since the public didn't know what the guy was really like, they elected him, and ever since have had to put up with his feuding with anybody and everybody, including the entire county legislative delegation and the entire county commission, and he thinks he answers to nobody.
Ain't politics grand?
Dominik Hasek of the Detroit Red Wings (who I happen to hate, but that's another story) has refused to accept the 3 million dollars in salary that he would have been due since he has been out with an injury. It's pretty classy of him to turn down his salary since he can't be out on the ice earning it. Sure, it's not like he needs another $3 mil, but how many other athletes have you heard of refusing to be paid because they aren't able to play?
Hasek had retired for a year, but unretired and came back to the NHL this season. My guess is that the reason he unretired was because he got bored with not playing. For the year he was retired, he had been playing as a skater in an inline hockey league in the Czech Republic, but he got suspended for a year because of a fight he got in, where the other guy, who started it, got rather beat up. It was after he got suspended from inline hockey that he decided to go back to the NHL, so I wouldn't be surprised if he retires again and goes back to playing inline in his home town (steering clear of fights this time).
My voice was starting to go today because of allergies, and then tonight we were at the Lightning vs. Rangers game, and midway through the second period, I was screaming and all of a sudden, my voice completely went. I've been squeaking when I talk ever since. It's not very fun. Probably by Sunday, I'll only be able to talk in a whisper, because somebody my dad knows gave us tickets that they couldn't use for tomorrow nights game, so bye bye voice.
Little brother has decided to follow in big brother's footsteps and go to Liberty University, rather than following in both sister's footsteps and going to Covenant. Little brother does not like Covenant because he thinks that most Covenant students are slobs with bad hygiene, a problem that going to a school with a dress code avoids.
I was looking at the student handbook last night, and man does Liberty have a lot of rules. The list of all the things that you can get demerits for (they call them "reprimands"), ranges from 1 rep for each half hour past curfew; to 12 reps and a $70 fine for watching a movie with a rating above PG 13; to 30 reps, a $150 fine, community service, and the possiblity of getting kicked out if you get caught with alcohol. There are plenty of other ways you can get in trouble, and if you do, it adds up fast. Most of the higher penalty violations are things that you shouldn't be doing anyway, but some are downright looney. According to their point system, drinking alcohol is seen as just as bad as physical or sexual assult, drug dealing, or commission of a felony. And, just being with someone who is drinking is as bad as sexual harassment or lying to the Dean during an investigation.
I'm kind of thinking that when my parents take my brother to school, they're going to end up having to take most of his music back with them. Students are allowed to have any music they want, so long as it isn't "lewd" (there goes the rap albums) or "anti-christian." He says that none of his music is "anti-christian," but I'm not so sure that the school will agree with that assertion, since he has a large quantity of metal, including death, mellow death, and black metal. He doesn't listen to any music in those genres that have anti-christian content, but Fundamentalists don't generally make distinctions. Having spent most of the first 16 years of my life in Southern Baptist churches, I got it hammered into my head, year after year, that "heavy metal" was "satanic" and "of the devil," and I don't think that position has changed. Oh well, he's good at arguing, maybe he can convince people that his music isn't of the devil, and that if it was, he wouldn't be listening to it.
I do think that he'll have a different experience at Liberty than my older brother did, if for no other reason than that my older brother went into that setting having spent his formative years as a Baptist, while my little brother will go in there having been thoroughly indoctrinated as a Calvinist.
As the story has grown, more and more non-hockey fans have been chiming in to voice their opinion on the Todd Bertuzzi cheap shot that broke Steve Moore's neck during Vancouver's 9-2 loss to Colorado Monday night. The sports pundits who never bother with hockey unless something like this happens have decided that Monday's turn of events, as well as McSorley's stick to the head of Brashear, is case in point proof for why the NHL should have a zero tolerance policy on fighting. Such pundits seem to think that cheap shots happen because of a sports culture where fighting is not only tolerated, but part of the game, and think that if fighting went the way of the dodo bird, cheap shots would as well.
Lets think this thing over. Bertuzzi's hit on Moore was a premeditated retaliation for a perfectly legal open ice hit that Moore leveled on Vancouver's captain, Markus Naslund, last month. The hit, while legal, resulted in a concussion for Naslund, causing him to miss three games. Traditionally, if your teammate gets knocked out of a game because they were injured by a check, the response is to fight the player who delivered that check. The problem is dealt with then and there, and that's that. However, with the advent of the Instigator Rule in the NHL, if a player instigates a fight, the fighting penalty is increased, making the marginal cost of fighting too great. This means that instead of standing up for your injured teammate in that game, if you are going to retaliate, you do so like Bertuzzi did Monday night--with a cheap shot. Nobody expected the cheap shot to break Moore's neck, but make no mistake, it was completely intentional, and Bertuzzi was just the messenger. If it hadn't been him, someone else would have delivered the retaliatory hit on Moore.
This brings me to the second reason why fighting is appropriate as a policing mechanism. Bertuzzi would have never delivered the cheap shot on Moore if he had expected to get beat up by the Avalanche if he did. That kind of hit is just asking to get beat up, but with the instigator rule, players can go around whacking people in the head with a stick like McSorley did, or slamming people's heads into the ice like Bertuzzi, and do it all without the fear of retribution.
A little fighting goes a long way, and the fear of retribution is a powerful motivator, raising the opportunity cost of a dirty hit. Doing away with the instigator rule and thus lowering the opportunity cost of fighting would go a long way toward cleaning up the game. There's a reason why dirty hits have been on the rise in recent years, and that reason is that the instigator rule removed a powerful disincentive agaist dirty cheap shots. If the NHL is serious about protecting players, the only options I see are either making it non-contact like women's hockey, or else doing away with the instigator rule to let players police the game themselves. As it is, checking without disincentive for dirty hits is a recipie for disaster. I for one would rather the game go back to the way it used to be played, with good clean hits, and fighting when necessary in order to keep it that way.
Friday night I went to see the Tampa Bay Lightning play the New Jersey Devils in what turned out to be a very exciting game. Problem is, a number of the Ligntning fans missed the excitement because they left with 5 minutes left in the game and the Bolts only down by one. It wasn't exactly a pretty sight for most of the game, because the Lightning looked out of sync and were unable to get much of any offense going because the Devils made good use of the neutral zone trap and kept the puck in the Lightning zone for most of the game. Since things weren't looking so good for Tampa Bay, people started leaving early, and missed Vincent Lecavalier's game tieing score with 9.6 seconds left, and missed the Lightning's overtime win, which allowed them to retain their position at the top of the Eastern Conference, and set up their move to number one in the league after Saturday's game against the Panthers.
Another thing. If your team is the #1 team in the Eastern Conference and a serious President's Cup contender, you don't bring signs saying "We Believe" to the game. "We Believe" signs are for fans of 8th seeds who barely squeeked into the playoffs and who have no chance without a miracle, not for the team with the best road record in the league, the team that's one point out of first place.
That sound you just heard was C.S. Lewis turning over in his grave.
Word is that Disney is behind a plan to make The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe into a movie, tenatively to be released Christmas of 2005, with plan to make movies out of all seven books. It makes commercial sense, what with the success of the Harry Potter films, and since Disney is probably still kicking itself that Miramax let LOTR get away, but I just don't see Disney pulling off Chronicles of Narnia series without destroying it.
C.S. Lewis had a very low opinion of Disney--in several essays he wrote on fairy tales, he had rather scathing comments about the Disney presentation of fairy tales, so if anybody was going to make his artistic vision into a movie, I'm sure that Disney would be the last studio he would chose.
The town of Killington, VT voted Tuesday night to secede from Vermont and try to join New Hampshire, despite being 25 miles from the border. They're mad about property taxes in Vermont, and New Hampshire has lower taxes.
I think they should just take a page out of Dade County, GA's book and declare themselves independent of any state. That would be more interesting, anyway.
I checked my page referral statistics and discovered that over the last few days, I've had a fairly decent number of hits coming from a post I made on Slashdot in a discussion of one of the slashdot polls. Somebody made a joke about how the reason mini-skirt wasn't one of the options because it was /. after all, so being the good slashdot reader that I am, I posted an "insensitive clod" reply about being a girl and wearing skirts, and I got more people clicking on my url in the message header than I ever have had with any other post I've made. I've had posts modded up to +5, Interesting, but one little mention of being a girl and people decide to visit my site. I just thought that was funny (I will withold any comments about nerds and relationships).
...the same player was named player of the month for two consecutive months. That player is Martin St. Louis of the formerly laughing stock turned Eastern Conference leader Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new study out on internet usage. According to the summary 44% of internet users have posted content of some kind or another somewhere on the internet. The study found that 10% of those surveyed have posted something on an online newsgroup, and 2% have blogs. These numbers seem like they might be low, so I'm wondering if the data is skewed downward by the fact that the survey was conducted by telephone. There has been some indications that young adults are less likely than the rest of the population to have land line telephones and rely on cell phones instead, and this, combined with the fact that young adults are historically the hardest group to accurately survey suggests that they may have failed to get a good survey of the people most likely to be blogging and posting on newsgroups.