FUNNY: Stephon Marbury tells Steve Francis that he (Steph) is the real All-Star, then plays crappy for the rest of the game:

During a timeout in the second quarter, Marbury taunted Rockets point guard Steve Francis, saying that he, not Francis, was the real All-Star on the court.

Francis let the insult go, and Marbury went ice cold from the field.

After making three of his first six shots, Marbury went 9-for-23 the rest of the night, spelling doom for a Suns offense that shot 37 percent for the game.

"You never want to blame a back-to-back for a loss, because it can be done," said Marbury, who still finished with a game-high 32 points. "You've just got to focus. The last game is in the past, the next game is the future, this game is the present."

And this game could be summed up in two plays for Marbury and the Suns.

Midway through the fourth quarter, Marbury used his quickness and agility to step in front of a Francis pass and steal the ball. With those same lightning-fast legs, Marbury raced furiously down the court ... only to have his fast-break layup attempt blocked by Kelvin Cato.

One good play for the Suns, one better play by the Rockets.

Via Steph Fanboy #1 Lang Whitaker. The Rookie Of The Year Yao vs. Rookie Of The Year Stoudemire thing never really materialized, and both teams are kind of sketchy anyway; the Rockets won this less-than-epic contest.

ELDRED VS. ASHCROFT: "Every time someone cuts away a part of the U.S. Constitution¹, a little piece of me dies; I'm very American in that regard." That's Dirk Deppey today, bringing me the news that the Supreme Court--by a motherfreaking 7-2 margin--has decided against Eldred and for Ashcroft. What a bunch of schmucks. So I go over to Instapundit to get the link to the Lessig blog and find Glenn's already got an opinion posted:

The Court’s strict constructionists believe that Congress should be held to the powers spelled out in the Constitution. By limiting the government to the powers enumerated in the Constitution, they believe, we reduce opportunities for government corruption and preserve the greatest amount of individual freedom. That kind of thinking led a lot of people to believe that the patent and copyright power of Congress should be read narrowly: when Congress acts on these matters, it should have to act in a way that would be clearly calculated to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and that the monopoly created by the patent and copyright laws should be limited in time.

In passing the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, Congress drastically extended copyrights, including some dating back when my daughter’s great-grandmother was born. Many people thought this was unconstitutional: how can nearly a century of copyright protection be considered a “limited time,” — especially when Congress keeps extending it? And how can rewarding people who have been dead for decades produce more creativity?

The majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg largely ignored those questions, leaving such issues to Congress’s discretion. (Though the influence of Big Media money on Congress suggests that the Framers were on to something where the corruption angle is concerned.) More strikingly, all the Justices who have stood for limiting Congress’s powers in other recent cases (such as United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison) sided with her, calling their commitment to limited government into question. It was left to the unlikely duo of Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Stephen Breyer to write, in dissent, about the importance of limited Congressional power. While many people are unhappy with the Intellectual Property implications of this decision, its most striking aspect is the strict constructionists’ abandonment of the principles of limited government. I predict that this will come back to haunt them in future cases.

Larry Lessig sounds more disappointed at this point than concerned with what the decision meant and whatnot--as you would expect:

There is a single, central question that has divided this Court over the past decade: Is it the Court’s role to review and constrain Congress in the exercise of its enumerated power. Four justices have been generally strongly in favor of deference. Five justices have insisted on limits. These five have insisted that an interpretation of Congress’s enumerated powers that erases any effective limit to that enumerated power is wrong. Four justices have consistently rejected that argument. Not that these four don’t vote to strike down laws of Congress. But rather these four don’t strike laws of Congress on the ground of this “principle of enumeration.”

These four justices were consistent with their principles in this case. Indeed, three of them wrote opinions in this case. Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority. She has never been a fan of the enumeration principle. She didn’t even mention it in her opinion. Justices Stevens and Breyer wrote dissents. They each had reasons why they believed Congress had gone too far. But neither invoked this principle of enumeration.

Stupidly, as I see now, I thought the hardest group on this Court to convince of our view would be these four justices. Deference is their ordinary mode. Deference was the strongest argument against us. So I was very happy to read the extremely strong opinions by two of these four, each for different reasons showing just why Congress had gone too far.

But again, missing from both opinions was the argument that I believed would win this case: That if there is a principled reason why Congress’s power is limited in the context of the commerce clause (and elsewhere), then that reason applies even more strongly in the context of the copyright clause. As we said over and over again, if you agree with the line of cases that Chief Justice Rehnquist is most famous for, then you must agree that the Copyright Clause restricts retroactive extensions. As the Chief Justice taught in the case of Lopez, if an interpretation of Congress’s power yields the conclusion that Congress’s power is unlimited, it is an improper interpretation. Yet that is precisely what the government conceded its interpretation did.

Thus, again, it was no surprise this argument was absent from Justices Stevens and Breyer’s opinion. Nor was it a surprise that it was absent from Justice Ginsburg’s opinion. She too has consistently argued that Congress’s discretion is broad. Her opinion is an excellent opinion for one who believes that the Supreme Court should defer to Congress’s judgments except where they are wholly irrational. “Irrational” in this context means that there is no possible set of facts that would supply the law with a reason. And as we have said from the start, we do not believe the Bono Act fails that test.

The puzzle in the case was the silent 5 — the 5 justices who have consistently argued that Congress’s power is limited; that enumerated powers must be read in a way that makes sense of those limits. It was my judgment that those justices would apply the same principle to the Copyright Clause, or at least explain why they did not. And ever since the argument on October 9, I have struggled to imagine how they could ever write an opinion that would distinguish commerce from copyright.

It had never even crossed my mind that these 5 justices would simply duck the issue. By assigning the opinion to a justice who has consistently rejected that principle (Justice Ginsburg), the Chief Justice avoided any need to show why his principle of enumeration applied to some clauses of Article I, sec. 8, but not others. And as there was no reason for the dissent to mention the argument, the case gets decided without the central argument that we had advanced even being discussed. It was Hamlet without the Prince.

Your two dissenters were Justices Stevens and Breyer. Stevens said:

Writing for a unanimous Court in 1964, Justice Black
stated that it is obvious that a State could not "extend the
life of a patent beyond its expiration date," Sears, Roebuck
& Co. v. Stiffel Co., 376 U. S. 225, 231 (1964). As I shall
explain, the reasons why a State may not extend the life of
a patent apply to Congress as well. If Congress may not
expand the scope of a patent monopoly, it also may not
extend the life of a copyright beyond its expiration date.
Accordingly, insofar as the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act, 112 Stat. 2827, purported to extend
the life of unexpired copyrights, it is invalid. Because the
majority's contrary conclusion rests on the mistaken
premise that this Court has virtually no role in reviewing
congressional grants of monopoly privileges to authors,
inventors and their successors, I respectfully dissent.

And Breyer:

The Constitution's Copyright Clause grants Congress
the power to "promote the Progress of Science . . . by se-
curing for limited Times to Authors . . . the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings." Art. I, §8, cl. 8 (emphasis
added). The statute before us, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copy-
right Term Extension Act, extends the term of most ex-
isting copyrights to 95 years and that of many new copy-
rights to 70 years after the author's death. The economic
effect of this 20-year extension--the longest blanket ex-
tension since the Nation's founding--is to make the copy-
right term not limited, but virtually perpetual. Its pri-
mary legal effect is to grant the extended term not to
authors, but to their heirs, estates, or corporate succes-
sors. And most importantly, its practical effect is not to
promote, but to inhibit, the progress of "Science"--by
which word the Framers meant learning or knowledge, E.
Walterscheid, The Nature of the Intellectual Property
Clause: A Study in Historical Perspective 125-126 (2002).
The majority believes these conclusions rest upon prac-
tical judgments that at most suggest the statute is unwise,
not that it is unconstitutional. Legal distinctions, how-
ever, are often matters of degree. Panhandle Oil Co. v.
Mississippi ex rel. Knox, 277 U. S. 218, 223 (1928)
(Holmes, J., dissenting), overruled in part by Alabama v.
King & Boozer, 314 U. S. 1, 8-9 (1941); accord, Walz v. Tax
Comm'n of City of New York, 397 U. S. 664, 678-679 (1970).
And in this case the failings of degree are so serious that
they amount to failings of constitutional kind. Although
the Copyright Clause grants broad legislative power to
Congress, that grant has limits. And in my view this
statute falls outside them.

I will end with something from the Lessig blog:

One friend offered a reason in an email of condolence. Those 5, he said, save their activism for issues they think important. They apply their principle to causes they think important. Protecting states is a cause they think important. Protecting the public domain is not.

By what right? By what g.d. right? These five justices have all the right in the world to have their own principled way of interpreting the constitution. Long before this case, I had written many many pages trying to explain the principle I thought inherent in the decisions of these five justices. I have spent many hours insisting on the same to ever-skeptical students. But by what right do these 5 get to pick and choose the parts of the constitution to which their principles will apply?

Like Dirk said--bastards.

UPDATE: Siva Vaidhyanathan has tons of stuff on this.

ZEBRA ZEBRA CHARLIE NINER: I mostly dig Gregg Easterbrook, he's a little too cutesy and self-referential sometimes--you know, Flaming Thumbtacks, Jersey/A, Indigenous Persons, etc.--but overall I enjoy his stuff. And I agree with what he has to say about the recent criticisms of NFL officials:

That flags should not fly on decisive plays numbers among the strangest contentions in sports. Of course officials shouldn't make bad calls on the final play, but they shouldn't make bad calls in a scoreless first quarter, either. Running into the kicker is illegal. It's illegal during a scoreless first quarter and it's illegal on the decisive play of overtime. Don't want a flag? Don't break the rules.

It would be one thing to argue that Dwayne Washington did not run into the kicker or that the Miami defender did not hold the Ohio State receiver -- that is, that the calls were wrong. But Pittsburgh can't argue this, because Washington plowed into Joe Nedney plenty good. If you made an officiating instructional tape to show what constitutes running into the kicker, you couldn't pick a better play as an exemplar. The Miami holding question is not as open-and-shut. TMQ thinks it was indeed holding, but has certainly seen the same action before without yellow floating by.

At any rate, the notion that officials should ignore penalties on game-deciding plays -- essentially, that everything becomes legal when the outcome is on the line -- is what's "ludicrous." Want to legalize running into the kicker? Start a campaign for that. Don't tell me it should be legalized only when your team is trailing in overtime.

It's equally "ludicrous" to contend that when flags fly on decisive plays this means the officials, rather than the players, are deciding the game. If the zebras had allowed Dwayne Washington to do something illegal, wouldn't that be deciding a playoff game in Pittsburgh's favor? If officials at the Fiesta Bowl had allowed defensive holding when Ohio State faced fourth down in overtime, wouldn't that be deciding a championship game in Miami's favor?

There are examples of bad calls that decided games, including Vinny Testaverde's 1998 Phantom Touchdown given to the Jets on a last play against Seattle and the Phantom Interference in the 1998 Buffalo-New England contest. For the latter, the Bills were flagged for interference in the end zone on a Hail Mary on the final play; the Pats scored on their bonus down to win, while replays clearly showed their Hail Mary receiver was never touched. That call was "ludicrous" because it was a bad call. But if there had been interference, of course a yellow hanky should have sailed. Just because it's the deciding play does not make infractions temporarily legal.

TMQ admires those officials who throw flags on the decisive downs of big games, so long as their flags are correct. These admirable officials don't stop doing their jobs just because they might be criticized. Also, they have to live with people like Bill Cowher using them as scapegoats for a team's inability simply to win on the field.

He's also attacking SUVs over on TNR, which I hope inspires some kind of defense from the Reason guys or somebody. Just so I could read it and enjoy it--I don't really have a horse in the moral content of SUVs contest.

SILLY: Marty Burns in SI today picks the top five owners in the NBA:

1. Mavericks: He might drive David Stern crazy, but Mark Cuban is committed to winning. He pays his players and coaches, and he gives the fans a good show.
2. Kings: The Maloof Brothers are two rich playboys who don’t mind sharing in their good fortune. Like Cuban, they enjoy the game like real fans.
3. Blazers: Paul Allen hasn’t received much bang for his league-high payrolls the past few years, but at least he’s trying.
4. Knicks: Few clubs have the deep pockets of Cablevision. In the past they’ve been willing to spend to keep their high-priced corporate clients happy.
5. Bucks: Despite limited resources and a small market, Sen. Herb Kohl flashed some serious power of the purse in signing George Karl, Ray Allen and Tim Thomas.

I agree with Cubes and the Maloofs, but how are the Knicks and Blazers on there? Both of those teams are woefully mismanaged--the Blazers' style of assembling the biggest rogue's gallery they can find has never produced in the playoffs, while the Knicks' willingness to spend barrels of cash on mediocre players is just amusing and pathetic (though it does my fannish heart good.) How does Jerry Buss not make that list? He doesn't blow the cash, but he does have a commitment to winning. The same with the new Steinbrenner-backed Rod Thorn-administered Nets ownership. I would replace spots 3 and 4 up there with the Lakers and Nets, plus maybe whoever owns the Spurs (for being able to succeed in a small market for as long as they have) or whoever owns the Grizzlies now and hired Jerry West. Yep.

I have less of a beef with the 5 worst owners:

1. Clippers: Owner Donald Sterling has let so many players move away, he ought to work for Century 21. But at least his Hollywood friends get to sit courtside.
2. Bulls: They broke up a dynasty in order to slash payroll. Then they didn’t have the good sense to cut Michael Jordan into the action as an owner.
3. Cavaliers: The Gund Family let go of Andre Miller because they didn’t want to pay him a maximum contract. They say the club is not for sale, but ...
4. Celtics: OK, so they’ve got new ownership now. But former owner Paul Gaston makes this list for cutting costs (Rodney Rogers) just before the sale.
5. Hornets: George Shinn made a mess of the situation in Charlotte, then spurned Jordan’s offer to buy in. Now he’s letting Paul Silas twist in the wind.

The (Other) Donald has resumed his cretinous non-spending ways and the Clippers are doomed yet again--so that's a very safe pick. Sterling is always in the running for the Worst Owner In All Of Sports award, along with the Bidwill brothers and that guy who owns the Bengals. The Bulls are a good choice, I like the Cavs so I don't think the Gunds are doing that badly, the Celtics have always had a rotating ownership--I'm not sure how bad or good that is--and George Shinn--I mean, he got what he wanted, and the Hornets are pretty good, so maybe he isn't that bad an owner after all.

OH, AND THANK THE GOOD LORD FOR NBA LEAGUE PASS: Rockets-Suns, tonight in Houston. Rookie of the Year vs. Rookie of the Year. I love this game.

NBA HYPE: Mavs-Kings in Sacramento is tonight and the Sac Bee is bringing the hype. So is the Dallas News, even if Don Nelson is saying it's just another game. No French guy yet, either. But you should watch this game, you really should.

THE HEY?: From the new Hitch on Slate:

This legislation committed the United States to support the removal of Saddam Hussein by the exercise of any force but its own. The plan was to identify Iraqi and Kurdish groups that merited support and to endow them with money for propaganda and rebellion. In one stroke, it also neatly squared an awkward circle: The administration and Congress could be identified with a hawkish (or perhaps hawk-ish) line on Iraq without risking the lives of any Americans or interrupting Clinton's fatuous attempt to earn himself a Nobel Prize for settling the Israel-Palestine dispute.

Hawkish but not hawk-ish? What am I missing here? Oh, you meant Sideshow Bob.

IMAGINED CONVERSATION WITH AUTHORITY FIGURE: "You know what your deal is? You have a tiny little sphincter. Am I right? You can barely get the waste products out. Me, I have an expansive sphincter--the poops just drop out. My sphincter contains volumes. Freud was wrong about a lot of things but he was right about the sphincter and you, my friend, are a case in point." Or whatever that phrase is, he thought to himself.

JUST LINKING, NO THINKING: Some stuff I've found interesting lately.

Daze sends us towards P.J. Huffstutter's See No Evil in the LA Times calling for regulation of the porn industry, using Anne Marie Ballowe--the former Brooke Ashley--as an example.

Charles Murtaugh brings the goods twice, first with this Eugene Goodheart thing decrying E.O. Wilson's attempt to make biology the king of all forms of knowledge. Says Goodheart:

Sociobiology has another adversary in the radical skepticism of postmodernism, which denies the natural sciences, as it does to other discourses, any claim to objective knowledge, despite the amazing progress sciences have made in, for example, our understanding of the genetic makeup of living creatures. (I place "our" in quotation marks because we delegate scientific understanding and conviction to scientists. Our faith or trust in them–these modern-day Prosperos, if you will–is based in part on the evidence of the technology and medical advances that have come out of science.) One is not required to defend the scientism of Wilson and Diamond to affirm the scientists’ claims for the objectivity of their discoveries. It is, of course, true that scientific claims are always provisional and can be superseded by new knowledge. But there are claims that have been consolidated and not superseded, and those claims that have been superseded can be placed on a curve of progress to a better understanding of phenomena. My purpose here, however, is not to defend science–for it needs no defending–but rather to reflect on the opposition between two isms: scientism and radical postmodernism. Both are, in my view, detrimental to the cause of science and of the humanities.

For Wilson, scientism–he calls it the Enlightenment–and postmodern epistemology would appear to be the either/or of theoretical debate in the academy. "Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis to the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be explained as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing." One theory aims for the unity of knowledge, the finding of ultimate explanations for everything; the opposing theory aims for a radical skepticism about the possibility of any certain knowledge. What they have in common is that both theories are grand theories–radical postmodernists would bridle at the attribution–with the ambition to account for everything. They are reductionist and therefore interdisciplinary in a bad sense, for they display an insufficient respect for the integrity and autonomy of the disciplines. Both theories are dogmatic and therefore incapable of that mixture of confidence and epistemological modesty that says, "This we can know, this we may yet know, this remains in the realm of mystery, subject to a variety of speculation and interpretation that cannot be resolved to certain knowledge."

Second there's this David Lodge essay on consciousness and the fact that literature has always understood it while science has not--or something to that effect. There's a history of the consciousness in there too:

Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens , observes that philosophy's "preoccupation with what we call consciousness now is recent - three and a half centuries perhaps." It is not, he says, merely that the word did not exist before then - neither did the concept. It was not coincidental that this same period saw the emergence of a new form of narrative literature in Europe which soon became dominant. Ian Watt, in his classic study of that phenomenon, The Rise of the Novel , suggests that "both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change - that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one - one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and in particular places."

Watt observed that whereas earlier narrative literature usually recycled familiar stories, novelists were the first storytellers to pretend that their stories had never been told before, that they were entirely new and unique, as is each of our own lives according to the empirical, historical, and individualistic concept of human life. They did this partly by imitating empirical forms of narrative like auto biography, confessions, letters, and early journalism. Defoe and Richardson are obvious examples.

But there was also a new emphasis on the interiority of experience, which Watt suggests followed from Descartes making consciousness the basis for a definition of man: "I think, therefore I am," in the famous formula. Watt observes that "once Descartes had given the thought processes within the individual's consciousness supreme importance, philosophical problems connected with personal identity naturally attracted a great deal of attention. In England, for example, Locke, Bishop Butler, Berkeley, Hume and Reid all debated the issue."

And this debate, the precursor of our own contemporary consciousness debate, fed into fiction both indirectly, through the process of meme transmission described by Dawkins, and in some cases, like that of Laurence Sterne, directly. Phenomena such as memory, the association of ideas in the mind, the causes of emotions and the individual's sense of self, became of central importance to speculative thinkers and writers of narrative literature alike.

It is probable that the fairly recent invention and rapid development of printing contributed to that process. The increasing availability of books in which exactly the same story could be experienced privately, silently, by discrete individuals, was a marked departure from the usual transmission of stories in preprint culture by means of oral recitation or dramatic performance in front of a collective audience. The silence and privacy of the reading experience afforded by books mimicked the silent privacy of individual consciousness.

This privacy, the fact that no one knows our thoughts as intimately as we ourselves know them, is what makes consciousness such a challenge to scientific investigation. "Consciousness," says Susan Greenfield in The Human Brain: A Guided Tour , "is the ultimate puzzle to the neuroscientist; it is your most private place." But for the very same reason consciousness is of absorbing interest to novelists - and to their readers. "Fiction has, and must keep, a private address," Eudora Welty wrote.

Salon interviews John McWhorter and it was good:

So what is a racist then?

A racist is someone who hates black people because they are black and/or acts against the welfare of black people. That person today is increasingly rare. More to the point, as often as not that person can't have any effect on your life. So what's the big deal? I know that sounds naive, but if you have a basic ego, how much can that matter? We're taught to fall to pieces whenever there's a "racist." Why?

Well, that brings me to the next question: Do you really think that most black people do fall to pieces? Who and what are you talking about?

No, and that's one of the major themes of "Authentically Black." There is a split identity in black culture today, and I see this daily. There's what you're expected to do in public, and there's what you're expected to do in private. The black undergraduate who hears a professor use the word "niggardly" or hears something an administrator says that could be construed as "racist" and runs out of the classroom crying, I firmly believe, is not genuinely hurt. They have a sense that as good, thinking African-Americans it's their job to blow the whistle on racism in public. It's the same kind of theater that your counterculturally oriented white undergraduates pull.

So somebody says "nigger" or somebody draws a picture in some dorm, and a certain 25 black students jump out onto the central plaza and the local media comes and you've always got one or two of them who will cry. They're not cynical; it's not that they're doing it on purpose, but they have a sense that to be intelligent, engaged black people you're supposed to pull this kind of routine. Deep down, most black people know that some of these things will not destroy you, that you can succeed in a world even if it's not perfect. That is the biggest problem today -- the sense that to be authentically black is to cloak the black race in victimhood in public, no matter how well the race is doing. The idea is to keep whites on the hook. In private, this is not the way that black people talk.

The sadder truth is that for many white people, black people are a minority with a sad history, and they'd rather be rid of us completely. The very sad truth is that white people are much more important to black mythology than the other way around. That's not fair, but like many things that aren't fair, it's also true.

Might that be changing considering how much black culture has influenced white culture? What I find hard to believe is that whites aren't conscious in some ways of how they emulate black people.

Interesting question. Many black people are afraid that we're being co-opted. What they don't understand is how black white people are getting. And it's something that's easy to miss; fish don't know that they're wet. But it's at the point where hybridism is becoming very much the norm. Most people don't think about the fact that the way Britney Spears sings and moves is black.

It's not only in entertainment. You see it in the way people talk. A lot of "ebonics" is now ordinary speech. I don't know how many white girls I've seen calling each other "dude." "Dude" starts with black people and it percolates into white vernacular among men. Now white women are saying, "Dude, let's go get our nails done." It's a black thing. If you look at a silent film, at white people moving in 1903, they don't walk like white people now, they don't nod like white people. All of us are blacker. So what we're really moving towards is a Mariah Carey, Tiger Woods sort of thing. Nowadays, black people do matter more to white people, but in a good way, because black people are in white people and they don't even know it, which is the way it should be.

Which is the way it should be?

Yeah, because we're moving towards getting past race. Al Sharpton wouldn't like that, but we're going to get past it. Getting past it does not mean these communities of wary blacks and wary whites eyeing each other and writing Op-Eds about each other.

Do they feel that way about hip-hop? It's mostly black controlled.

Hip-hop is interesting. It's almost as if people are waiting for it to be co-opted. But the thing is that there is no hip-hop Elvis and there's not going to be one. There is Eminem, but nobody would claim that he is taking the lion's share. There is nobody who thinks of Eminem as the quintessence of hip-hop.

But people have compared him to Elvis. Well, he compares himself to Elvis, anyway.

In that way that he is a white hip-hopper. But he is not taking over the field. He is not making more money than any other number of hip-hoppers. He is just one of the many. And he's doing fine. But he's not taking over in the way that Elvis did. Elvis made it and all of a sudden he's making more money than Chubby Checker and Sam Cooke and all the others combined. Eminem's not doing that, he's not going to, nor will any white hip-hopper do it. Things have changed. The white kids in the suburbs are not listening only to Eminem. There's no sense that they like Eminem better than the black ones.

There you go.

MAVS MAKE WACKY SIGNING. DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING: The Mavs are about to sign Euro pro league great Antoine Rigaudeau. My guess is Don Nelson and Cubes are getting skittish about the Mavs' offense in the playoffs and worried about the coming Lakers resurgence so they decided another shooter to fit in with their system. I hope it works out for them, their bury-'em-with-quick-shots system needs to be completely overwhelming to produce results in the playoffs.

NORTH KOREA WEIRDNESS WATCH: As always, Corsair brings the goods.

THE GOOD KIND OF BLOWN CALL: Dean Juipe in the Las Vegas Sun thinks the ref who made the interference call that kept Ohio State alive in the championship should be getting horsewhipped or something by the media. "To have the result determined by an otherwise obscure man in a striped shirt was bad enough. But it's the fact that there was no post-game, public accountability is what really grates on me." Two things: one, there's no way that game should've ended on that play--the receiver and the defender were tangled up from the get-go and that would be a completely weak way to end a championship. Two, everybody hates Miami; everybody includes the media, and so that's why the ref is off the hook.

Look at this comment: "It may have been Ohio State and Miami playing in the decisive game, yet it was Porter -- as much or more than any Craig Krenzel pass or debilitating injury to Willis McGahee -- who ultimately decided the outcome." This reminds me of a kind of sports fandom that is unlike my own, one where you imagine sports to be this idealized environment where greatness is always conclusively proven--the best team always wins and there are no other factors worth considering. My own fandom--which I would like to think is more sophisticated--involves thinking of sports as a kind of spontaneous or unplanned drama where human factors are everywhere and are, in fact, part of the drama. A game where a ref takes on an active role is just altering the drama or in this case improving it, since that would've been a lousy way to end the game.

BOOTLEGS: One of those endless NPR programs had a segment on bootlegs last night and so I finally heard Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke Of Genius"--you know, Christina Aguilera's vocals from "Genie In A Bottle" over the music part of a Strokes song. Yes, it improved both songs but it didn't overwhelm me with greatness or anything. Maybe it requires further listenings. I dunno. It sounded like a Lita Ford song.

BLOGGUS REDUCICUS: As I cram for the muthafreakin PCAT. I took anatomy and physiology in the summer two summers ago because it would be a breeze and the PCAT covers a lot of that and I am left with oh-so-great gaps in my knowledge. I blame our community college system. Yep.

SPORTS BUSINESS STUFF: Eric McErlain has a good post about NHL finances and the Ottawa Senators.

WNBA CRAPPING OUT WATCH: The Portland Fire finally are put down. If anything kills the WNBA, it'll be these atrocious franchise names. The worst are now behind us--the Miracle, Sol, Fire and Starrzzzzz. The Fever and the Sting are lousy too. On the other hand, the Washington Mystics have one of the best franchise names ever, being a better sort-of synonym for their NBA counterpart Wizards. With the WNBA down to like twelve teams, maybe the league pass will be twenty bucks. And you still won't want to buy it.

GINGER'S BACK: But, then again, she was never really gone. Details here.

COMICS CRITICAL ESSAYS TO WRITE: One, MF Doom's Operation Doomsday (an album) considered as a transformative Fantastic Four fan fiction (he changes Dr. Doom's origin so that Reed Richards sabotaged young Von Doom's experiment that scarred his face.) Two, comparing and contrasting Mark Kalesniko's Mail Order Brider with David Mack's entire Kabuki oeuvre, wherein the former uses a character to examine his obsession with Asian girls from a distance, and the latter builds a conventional narrative using his obsession with Asian girls as a medium almost. Yessiree.

YAO WATCH: Page Two is doing the Yao stuff today, as they have Ralph Wiley taking a trip on the wayforward machine as he reports on the coming Ming dynasty, while Bill Simmons recants his Yao-will-be-a-bust comments.

ANOTHER YEAR END LIST WORTH READING: Scott Thrill's Top Ten Reasons Why American Culture Didn't Suck In 2002. Yes, Bowling For Columbine is on there, but so are the Dallas Mavericks and Spirited Away and those two outweigh the movie I don't want to see by the bombastic hypocrite in my book. Via Fred Lapides.

UPDATE: Yes, Spirited Away is Japanese. I can't explain it. Since all ten items on this list receive pretty much universal acclaim from critics who cover these areas of our culture, maybe this should've been called the Top Ten Moments Of Received Wisdom or something.