PLAY MISSISSIPPI BURNING FOR ME: John Scalzi trashes the Confederacy because the Confederacy wrote slavery into their constitution which only makes sense but then loses me when he says that Southern people should get some non-Confederate symbols to express their heritage and comes off like the member-of-the-side-who-won he probably is. For I know of The Confederate Mack and know that symbols can transcend their origins. Yes I do.

Actually I just wanted to say "Play Mississippi Burning For Me."

RALPHPETERSWATCH: Vodkapundit sends us toward new stuff from the great Ralph and we enjoy it because he gives the always-scary Donald Rumsfeld what for:

Last year, Rumsfeld was on his way to being a failed SecDef. He had alienated the military and Capitol Hill. His arrogance convinced him that the uniformed leadership had nothing to offer; his "whiz kids" were there to teach the generals and admirals what war was all about. He pontificated about defense reform, while neglecting the military's practical needs.

The 9/11 attacks saved Rumsfeld's job. He proved a great SecDef for the first year of the war against terror. A man transformed, he demonstrated exceptional crisis skills. In his press briefings, he became the no-nonsense voice of a resolute country. He won me over, as he won over millions of others.

Now, it appears that his success has led him to an imperial level of arrogance. He seems determined to impose two badly flawed policies on our armed forces, ignoring the judgment of the military's most thoughtful leaders. Either - or both - may prove tragic.

And he ends with:

Rumsfeld likes to strut upon the stage, projecting courage in his disputes with the generals and admirals. But guts aren't required. The law gives him the power to bully military officers. If he's a real man, he'll take on Lockheed Martin.

But don't count on it. It's easier to ignore the generals, then blame them when the body bags come home.

This Halloween, there's no doubt whose spirit will haunt the halls of the Pentagon.

Unlike Vodka I am way ready to believe Ralph on this because he is Ralph and I respect his opinion and am more inclined to trust him than Rummy. Plus nigh-personal attacks in the New York Post always work for me.

POLITICO BLOG JAM: Jim Henley sends us over to the new Stand Down blog, which is devoted to opposing the war on Iraq, but with the unique angle that it's a "left-right blog" and aims to involve posters of all kinds of political stripes. That's quite the all-star roster they got there. It should be fun, and a good antidote to the view that warbloggers speak with one voice on this here issue.

ENN BEE "A": Both of the Bill Simmons NBA Conference previews are up now, but because this is the NBA in 2002, the really interesting stuff is in the Western preview. Here he is on the team that I am hyped to see for some reason--maybe even more than the Rapmaster--the Memphis Grizzlies:

As Pete Carroll would say, "I'm as shocked as you guys!" Once Drew Gooden started slapping 20-10's on everyone in the preseason, it pushed me over the edge. Drew Gooden! Who knew? I'm so excited about the Grizzlies, I'm dusting off the old Hubie Brown impression:


"Okay, you're Jerry West. You have Drew Gooden, who plays hard every night, crashes the boards, and does all the Little Things that helps your team win. You have Shane Battier and Michael Dickerson, who also love ... doing ... the Little Things. Then you have two athletic bodies with upside, Lorenzen Wright and Stromile Swift. You have Wesley Person and Gordon Giricek shooting threes. You have Jason Williams pushing the ball and CREATING scoring opportunities. And you have a premier offensive player in Pau Gasol, who commands double-teams. Now you're getting easy points, you're getting threes, you're wearing out other teams, and you have a GENUINE OFFENSIVE OPTION at the end of games. You're also not as bad as you were defensively last year. And you have a fan base that WANTS to win. Everywhere you look, you see upside, nothing but upside."

On the Houston Rockets, who he has finishing fourth in the West:

I love the NBA. Have I mentioned that? Here you have the Rockets, who were already one of the most fun teams in the league ... and now they have a 7-foot-5 Chinese guy playing center. It's too good to be true. Stevie Francis, Cuttino Mobley, Eddie Griffin, Glen Rice, Mo Taylor, Rudy T., Moochie Norris, Moochie Norris's hair, Kelvin Cato's Burmese snake, and a gigantic Chinese guy who also happens to be the most intriguing new player in the league. I still think he will be a modified bust -- Rik Smits with 20 times more distractions -- but Bob Ryan swears up and down that Yao Ming will eventually become the most important player in the league. And Ryan has forgotten more hoops than I ever learned.

Now I'm torn. When I was stating the case against Yao last June, one of the things I worried about was his personality -- every video clip of him in China looked like a hostage video, like the camera could pan back a couple of feet and you would see a gun being pointed to his head. And yet, by all accounts, Yao seems much happier in America. Just yesterday, I was reading a story in which Yao was startled after hearing a teammate say "What's up?" because the sound of the phrase resembled a Mandarin obscenity. So after they cleared up the confusion, Yao started shouting the phrase to everyone, and it's become a running joke in the locker room. Can you imagine Mobley and Francis saying "Wassup, Yao?", Yao breaking into hysterics, and then everyone attempting a nine-step handshake? These are the things that need to be televised.

Anyway, I'm digging the Rockets, not just because I might have been wrong about Yao, but because Francis and Taylor are healthy, Griffin is ready to make The Leap, and there isn't a better coach on the planet than Rudy T. If anyone can figure out how to make this work, it's him. Better yet, this is fun. I like having a 7-5 Chinese guy on the Rockets who may or may not be the future of the NBA.

Passages like this are why I dig Bill Simmons, not because I believe the Houston Rockets are going to finish fourth in the West--that seems pretty unlikely--but that Bill Simmons loves the Houston Rockets and gets his enthusiasm for them across. I like the Houston Rockets more for reading this.

And here he is on the Kings:

And yet, there are some jarring similarities here to Isiah's Pistons teams of the late-'80s. Remember how Detroit could have beaten the (banged-up) defending champs in the '87 Eastern Finals, if not for Vinnie Johnson and Adrian Dantley banging heads in Game 7 (like Peja's sprained ankle), or the Basketball Jesus singlehandedly saving the day in Game 5 (like Horry's back-breaking shot in Game 4)? The next season, those same Pistons regrouped and toppled their bitter rivals in six games. As the old saying goes, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

In other words, I'm picking the Kings.

The NBA started last night and the Magic beat the Sixers and the Spurs beat the Lakers and I watched most of the latter game, looking for the sweet Lakers loss and got it. This should be a fun fun season.

UPDATE: Oh, and the Marv/Czar/Van Gundy announcing trio was completely topnotch last night and I hope ABC goes with them on the big games. Their subdued sniping at each other is just a million times funnier than the Marv/Walton/Jackson cutesy-poo fights were.

THE OLD "WHAT IF BARRY SANDERS HAD EMMITT'S LINE" ARGUMENTS: I'm reading the new TMQ while waiting for the Simmons Western Conference preview to get posted, and Easterbrook offers a pretty good refutation to the "if only Barry had the Cowboys' line" argument:

But TMQ wonders, why were his teams always so crummy -- wasn't Sanders partly to blame? He was self-centered, aloof, concerned exclusively with his stats. Sanders refused to block -- became angry on the couple of occasions coaches tried to put in plays in which he was a blocker or a decoy -- and never learned anything in the passing game beyond the screen pass. He staged unexplained walkouts, and was often uncommunicative; frequently denounced the Lions in public and endlessly complained about his pay, though Sanders was always among the best-paid backs. Then he got mad, took his ball and went home.

In short, Barry Sanders was a jerk, and his me-first character is a reason the Lions usually were losers with him on the field. In a weird way, you sensed Sanders actually wanted the Lions to be losers, so he'd be the only exciting thing about the team and so he would never be tested under the ultimate pressure of the Super Bowl. Remember how poorly Sanders performed in his few postseason tests -- such as his minus-1 yard rushing day against Green Bay in the 1994 playoffs? Whenever the pressure was on, Barry folded.

It's sort of like the argument that guys putting up great numbers on lousy teams are part of what is making those teams lousy--their too selfish or in roles unsuited to their talents or something. Of course, Corey Dillon isn't supposed to be a jerk and the Bengals stink so it's not always truth. I dunno, I always liked Barry and am prone to the Barry=best ever because of the ridiculous numbers he put up, but his postseason is a knock against him unless you want to blame Wayne Fontes.

RADIO DAZE: Anyhow, all this radio talk reminds me of this old Virgina Postrel commentary about her thermostat:

My new thermostat was designed by brilliant morons.

It helps to explain why we can see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics: In too many cases, computing power still makes ordinary tasks more complicated than they need to be‹or used to be.

The old thermostat had a clear knob for setting the desired temperature. It simultaneously showed you how hot the room already was and how hot you wanted it to be. It had two simple switches, one for setting heat and one for setting fan or auto. Henry Dreyfuss and Carl Kronmiller's design of the round Honeywell wall thermostat is a touchstone of great industrial design: simple, elegant, considerate.

I'm thinking you could say something similiar about the new radio in my bathroom: it has this horrible digital readout for the radio where every possible station has to be recognized--in other words, every digit and every tenth you could add to that digit is on there, like 90.1, 90.2, 90.3, etc. And I have to press and hold this button down to get past these stations, which is time-consuming. The old radio had a dial, you could tune the stations in by hand and get just the right spot and get from one end of the FM band to the other extremely quickly. What possible advantage is there with the digital readout, other than knowing exactly where you are at all times? The cd player broke on the old stereo and I am stuck with progress, horrible progress. Hear my lamentations, oh Internet.

POP LOVE: But there is no reason not to love pop because No Doubt's "Underneath It All" is on the radio now, setting things right. No Doubt adds to all the other styles they've embraced over the years and made beautiful with this one, which is reggae-like and slow-building and fun. They are a Blondie for the new millennium, conveyors of sweet perfect pop.

POP HATE: Lileks got the new EW and posted something about the inherent ridiculousness of Avril Lavigne. He's not familiar with her music--he says once you get past thirty you "live outside the rules of radio"--but I still got the radio on and I wish to register a complaint about "Sk8er Boi" which is infecting the airwaves right now. It's musically okay but starts out with something like "there was a boy/there was a girl/can I make it any more obvious?" and--I mean--it's so jarring in a bad, pointless way. And she has this horribly affected lisp (lisp would be pronounced lishp but only sometimes.) God, I hope it's affected; if it isn't I apologize. And there's this line where her and her boyfriend "rock each other's world" and you hear something that sounds like a slide whistle--they're hinting at the intensity of their relationship using a slide whistle. It is the Song I Must Turn Past when scanning the radio--a spot usually occupied by whatever Lenny Kravitz's last song was. But maybe I'm not the target audience.

NBA HATE: If you missed it, Rick Fox and Doug Christie exchanged punches on the court Friday night (Fox's was more like a judo-or-something palm to the face, while Christie's was definitely an uppercut to the chin) and then Fox ambushed Christie in the back. It was great and it looked so much like a wrestling fight--sudden announcer confusion, cameraman rushing to the back, Shaq and Vlade all of the sudden standing there yelling at each other--that I thought it was staged. I mean, especially with Shaq's involvement--that guy has a love for drama. And I bet the Kings' security guy loved shoving Shaq away. No word that I've seen yet on whether the lady with the purse seen rushing back there was Doug Christie's wife.

SPIRITED AWAY: From the back of the back of The Gormenghast Novels, which I checked out again to read the second book and which Andrew O'Hehir probably implausibly cited in his review:

[Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. --C.S. Lewis

The same thing applies to Spirited Away.

A MUCH, MUCH BETTER BAG THAN THAT FREAKING BAG IN AMERICAN BEAUTY: BugPowder sends us over to Two-Handed Man's interview with Peter Bagge, which is wide-ranging and great. I hadn't even thought of his color HATE! issues in the way he was thinking of them, but it makes sense:

THM: How did the move from working to black and white to working with colour make your job as an artist harder and/or easier?

PB: My work habits generally remained the same, but what I was going for stylistically changed drastically. The basic art and stories in the colour HATEs were much more dense, intense and personal than in the earlier HATEs. As a result, I kept the linework cleaner and added colour to make it both easier to read AND digest. Those colour HATEs were much sadder and complex than the earlier ones, which basically were just Archie and Veronica/relationship nonsense.

THM: Hey, that's true. There was less of a wild carnival atmosphere, but the stories had a lot more emotional depth to them, as Buddy and Lisa got serious about making it work. And the colour made it look less like an underground comic and more like a nice classic Sunday strip.

PB: Yeah, the colour belied the content. There was a bit of a contradiction there. I basically was doing what Chris Ware (creator of the Acme Comics Library, published by Fantagraphics-THM) became more celebrated for, which was combining traditional, iconographic comic art and colours to tell rather grim subject matter.

THM: So the `friendlier' look that the colour gave it helped the audience deal with material that was stronger and more serious. Smart.

PB: I dunno how smart it was. I don't know if people appreciated what I was trying to do, for the most part. Some people did, but certainly not all.

THM: Maybe not on a conscious level, but it works on the level of being a well-told story, and that's where it counts.

PB: Those colour HATEs were the best things I've ever done by far. I'm extremely proud of them. I seem to be better-known and celebrated (if at all) for the early black and white HATEs, though.

My Ware-exposure is somewhat limited, but I can tell you that I can't see why he's gotten all the "best cartoonist of his generation" nods when good ol' P. Bagge's more mature HATE! being right there. Well, maybe they're different generations, but still. I think Bagge is perfectly justified in being slightly bitter here. The interview also brings up the Peanuts influence on HATE!:

THM: You're a big fan of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, but I don't seem to see any Schulz influence in HATE. What do you like about him?

PB: Well, from the late 1950's to about 1970 Schulz was the best cartoonist in the world. I loved the way his characters interacted, especially Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown. The ones starring those three were brilliant. And I see a similarity (which sometimes borders on being a rip-off) between those strips and many of my early comic strips. Girly Girl and Chucky Boy were Lucy and Linus, basically.

It's true the Schulz influence crops up in the character interactions. Another Schulz thing is the way Bagge--instead of using a bunch of different things--perfected his own style to such a degree that HATE!, like Peanuts, speaks a unique iconographic dialect. And both of their styles are inherently interesting--the facial expressions, the crazy tongues in Bagge--so perefecting said style is a very good thing. HATE! is only HATE! and Peanuts is only Peanuts. Something like that. And there's this "say it ain't so, Pete" moment: "I think that older, stable and mature people outgrow their need for fiction PERIOD. They're no longer searching for themselves or `the truth' because they've already found it." And he completely insults the Stones, gaining points with me, and fritters away those points by loving The Beatles, but regains them by putting The Beach Boys on the same level as The Beatles, which works for me because I think a lot of my Beatles hate comes from me thinking that there are people on their level and nobody evey mentions them or at least it comes across that way in the media. Plus The Beatles are too precise and emotionally distant to be of any use to me. But anyway, it's a great interview for us Bagge fans.

CLIPPERS WATCH: In the comments in one of those posts down there Bill Barnwell directed me to John Hollinger's alleyoop.com--the basketball page for thinking fans--which has Hollinger's previews for the East and a fascinating defense of The (Other) Donald:

Now let's get back to the media. They blew it on the Rashard Lewis saga in Seattle, and they're blowing it here too. The thing to understand about Brand and Miller not getting extensions, which the press has been so slow to realize, is that the teams are holding all the cards here. Rashard Lewis found it out the hard way -- Seattle offered $60 million, and it was written that the Sonics were making a huge mistake by underpaying when Lewis wanted the max. But under the new collective bargaining agreement, the Sonics were the smart ones -- they kept their guy for less money, and knew darn well that he wasn't going anywhere.

Look forward to next summer. Brand, Miller, Odom and Maggette will all be restricted free agents, which means the Clippers can tell each of them "get an offer and we'll match it; otherwise you're this year's Rashard Lewis." It might sound mean or draconian, but the fact is agents are still making demands based on the old agreement, and smart teams are realizing the rules have changed. Meanwhile, if Brand or Miller gets hurt, the Clips will have saved themselves a ton of cap room by not committing the dough ahead of time.

Finally, there's one other reason to think The Donald has changed his stripes, at least somewhat: Wang Zhizhi. Would The Donald of old have signed this guy to an offer sheet when a minimum wage guy could do the job just as effectively? Conspiracy theorists think he wants Zhizhi so they can have a cheaper guy at center when Olowokandi walks (for his maximum contract, guffaw, guffaw); to me, I would want Zhizhi for the more simple reason that he's better than Olowokandi.

As I said at the top, maybe The Donald will prove his stripes after the season, letting all his best players walk and cementing his place among the all-time worst owners. But when I consider the collective bargaining agreement, the fact that the teams are holding all of the cards in free agency, and how wildly overrated Olowokandi has become, I have to ask: isn't The Donald doing everything exactly right so far?

Hollinger's team previews are worth checking out too.

UPDATE: These previews rule. Here is the Kings' weakest link:

Nothing -- The only two weaknesses on the Kings' roster are "third-string point guard" and "Rick Adelman's beard."

The Kings are so strong at so many spots that they can suffer an injury to their second-best player and still nearly beat the world champions in a seven-game series. They can lose their best player for 20 games and go 15-5 without him, as they did to start last season. They have three quality centers in a league where most teams don't have any. None of their top nine players are below average defensively, and only Doug Christie, their best perimeter defender, is below average offensively. They have four players on their bench who would start for at least half the teams in the league. Their big men handle the ball better than most guys who are six inches shorter, and everyone on the team can shoot.

Summing it up, this team has only one weakness: Shaquille O'Neal. That's all that stopped them last year and is probably all that stands in their way again.

I love this game. Say that in Dikembe Mutombo's voice in your head for additional comedic effect.

HISTORY LESSON: Evan Daze sends in this corrective to my primitive history of the blog:

I don't dispute that September 11 was a watershed event
in the world of blogs (and in other things, natch) or that
that generational divide exist or that Instapundit was revolutionary.
The political blogs also seem to have innovated a greater
sense of community, with whole bunches of people writing
on the same topic and linking to each other's items and debating
(or agreeing with) each other, like a good Usenet group; you didn't
see much of that before, but now it's getting pretty common
across the board. I just blanch at the "blogs before 9/11 were
either all-tech or teenagers writing about daily minutiae" notion
that pops up now and again.

There you go.

NBA PREVIEW HATE: Marc Stein on ESPN proclaims Lakers-Kings the best rivalry in the NBA, and I would agree with that. I mean, there aren't a lot of other candidates; there's Lakers-Blazers (which exists to a large degree in the minds of the Blazers) and possibly Mavs-Spurs. Everything else is pretty burgeoning, plus having one team win all the time isn't providing the drama a fine rivalry would--and thus I express my distaste for the Jordan era in general. But I think the NBA is entering into a new era of greatness in terms of really entertaining and competitive basketball, so maybe we'll see some other ones crop up.

NBA PREVIEW LOVE: SI has their list of the Top 20 Games you should watch in the upcoming season. It's SI though, they say weird things sometimes in trying to appeal to a bigger audience, like:

Oct. 30: Utah at New Orleans It doesn't get any better than this. Not only does it mark the NBA's return to New Orleans, but also, for added effect the Hornets get to play the holders of their rightful name. Incidentally, could you imagine being one of the players 24 years ago and being told you were leaving New Orleans for Salt Lake City? No wonder they won only 24 games the next year; most of the players were probably clinically depressed.

Or this:

Nov. 23: Seattle at Dallas Please, please God, let these two teams meet in the playoffs. These two were born to face each other. Both shoot the lights out, neither has a care in the world about such annoyances as defense and rebounding, and each has a highlight-film dunker (Desmond Mason, Michael Finley) to jazz things up when we get tired of all the 3-pointers. The over on this game will be about 250.

Every Mavs game is a must-see game, they're like the Rams when the Rams were a travelling roadshow of fun fun fun. But all is forgiven when the writer, John Hollinger, says:

Dec. 13: New York at Miami The rest of the games on this list are games to watch. This is a game not to watch. These two teams were hard on the eyes even when they were good, because they were conspiring to ruin basketball, but now that they both stink it's a coma-inducing experience. As an added bonus, there's the hypnotic effect of those bright yellow seats in American Airlines Arena, practically screaming out, "Look at me. I'm empty. I've been this way for years. Help." I repeat, DO NOT watch this game.

Knicks/Heat jokes always work with me, it's half of the fun of Bill Simmons columns. Anyhow, it's kind of a goofy list, more of a vehicle for comments about the NBA than a compilation of Games You Should Watch. We can agree on this one:

Jan. 17: L.A. Lakers at Houston Yao Ming, this is Shaquille O'Neal. Welcome to the NBA. Try to stay in one piece.

But, really, any Mavs game should be watched. As well as any Kings/Lakers game or any Blazers/Lakers game. Watch the Spurs and Clippers too, and check in on the beloved Nets to see how Dikembe's working out, and the Rockets as we track Yao Ming's progress. And check in on the hated Knicks for the latest debacle.

NBA ON NB......ESPN: Slam Links sends us over to this preview of the NBA's first season on ESPN:

"It's cool. It's happening," ESPN lead analyst Bill Walton said Wednesday as the network trumpeted a production that just might make some of us give up street luge.

"Our viewers want athleticism," said Jed Drake, an X Games guy who joined ESPN in 1980 and will be the executive producer for 76 regular season games, mostly on Wednesdays and Fridays, plus the first two rounds of the playoffs and the conference finals.

Drake said focus groups helped inspire jazzy new cameras, audio, graphics and animation. Hey, it can't hurt. Ratings on NBC sagged from 3.3 in 1999-2000 to 2.9 the past two seasons.

There will be a camera that hovers over the court. In time, there will be cams in the floor under the baskets. The theme music was composed by Boris Zelkin - yes, that Boris Zelkin, whose credits include the movies "Lion King," "Crimson Tide" and "Broken Arrow."

Wait, there's more.

"We will have an aggressive studio operation that will be more athletic- and performance-based," Drake said. "It's not necessarily who's leading at the end of the first half."

"It's cool. It's happening."--Bill Walton. Live in fear, NBA fans.

SPIRITED AWAY: Now rating a 98 on Metacritic. It's just that good, peoples.

UPDATE: From the O'Hehir Salon review:

To those who want to ask practical questions, such as whether "Spirited Away" is an appropriate movie for children, I have no answers. Arguably it isn't an appropriate movie for anybody. It will disturb you as much as thrill you, make you wonder whether the boundaries between life and death, reality and fantasy, imagination and insanity are ever what they appear to be. But if your child, or you yourself, has a wild and dreamy streak and an appropriate contempt for high-minded adult certainties and well-adjusted behavior, then by all means don't miss it. Just remember the rules: Hold your breath while crossing the bridge, and don't wink at the Radish Spirit.

Any movie that arguably isn't appropriate for anybody probably should be seen by everybody. Yes.

UPDATE: Something influencing my Spirited Away love, I'm thinking, is living in a country where it isn't a big old phenomenon and the number one all-time box office hit like it is in Japan. Seeing something out of its pop cultural context means you're probably missing a lot of things, but to see it in its full context you'd have to actually be Japanese--so it isn't worth worrying about to begin with. Probably.

WELL HOW ABOUT THAT: Major League Baseball considering moving the Expos to Boston next season. Via Andrew Olmsted. Huh. Boston could conceivably support two teams, in terms of population and--more importantly--in terms of being an actual baseball city, unlike the various Florida cities MLB has stuck franchises in over the years. It could work.

ACTUALLY: Following this whole Dash/lgf blog FIGHT! thing has been more interesting to me in a sociological kind of way than anything else. Bennett, in his Bennett way, kind of says what I was thinking:

Anil Dash, in case you live in a cave, is a New York web elf of South Asian descent who started a smear campaign against Charles Johnson a few weeks ago, implying that Little Green Footballs was a racist site because it features commentary on the Arab Muslim press instead of commentary on Java applets and other tech trivia as it once did.

Not so much the smear stuff but the comment on "Java applets and other tech trivia" which was, as far as I can tell, the state of blogland pre-9/11, pre-Instapundit. Because before that time you had to know a little HTML or whatever the kids are using these days to get yourself a blog. Or that's what it seemed like. Then Glenn Reynolds came along and legitimized Blogger, so it was suddenly okay for somebody to just push their thoughts out there without, you know, any knowledge of web design or coding or whatever other things I am terribly terribly ignorant of. Which should have been obvious to anybody who ever read the Drudge Report, but still, the way Glenn did it in his encouraging, here's-what-I-think-howzabout-you? way started the ball rolling, combined with how easy Blogger is for us HTML simpletons (there's reasons why I haven't updated my YACCS code) and how much we all needed to talk after 9/11 led to this explosion in blog content, if not necessarily blog form.

I think I'm going off on a tangent; the point is, the subtext of the Dash-lgf conflict (as I hinted at earlier) is between Generation One of bloggers, who were tech-geeky in spirit and were left-leaning, sort of, but mostly apolitical, and Generation Two, who were dorks of a thousand stripes with (maybe only in my case) minimal design knowledge but, whether left or right or libertarian, had strong political opinions. Generation Two values content more than form, and while we may be geeks we're not strictly tech geeks and I guess that's the key difference. And lgf, by the way, is keeping track of the difference; Charles has his bloggage sidebar and his anti-idiotarian sidebar and never the two will meet, I guess. Maybe Generation Three will be some perfect synthesis of form and content and I will stand from afar and hate them for having neat webby things. Or maybe I just prefer the no-nonsense readability of a Blogger template.

To sum up my long, rambling point: the lgf/Dash brouhaha is on a secondary level part of a long-simmering fight between Olde Tech Blog and New Blog Of Ideas, which of course owes its existence to the Olde Tech Blog but stands in opposition to it in valuing non-tech content above all. Okay? Okay.

MAVSLOVE: Marc Stein says the Mavs will add defense to their gameplan this season. Remember, their old gameplan was to score so many points that it didn't matter if they played defense or not, and so they got smoked by the Kings in last year's playoffs. And one more reason to love the Mavs: NBA cult figure Raja Bell--best known for his part in truly great and heroic upset the Sixers had over the Lakers two years ago in the championship--has made the team. Of course, it's scary that Don Nelson considers Raja to be "the only real stopper I have" but I'll still watch.