perfidy

Talking to my mom the other day, we wondered if any city has suffered longer than Cleveland. It has been more than forty years since Cleveland has won a sports championship of any flavor. Boston fans have until recently been the greatest of whiners, bemoaning endlessly the decades that had lapsed since the Red Sox won a World Series. Waaagh, the curse of the Bambino, waagh, Bucky Fucking Dent, waaagh.

Of course, in the meantime, they’ve had several recent Patriots Super Bowl wins, and the Celtics once won eight NBA titles in a row, and that was in the middle of a 11 of 13 stretch. And even more of course, that’s completely aside of the fact that the Chicago Cubs had gone a full decade longer without a World Series win, and in fact never will win the World Series again.

A little research turned up a startling fact. There are 21 cities with at least three major league teams out of a possible four. (Only New York City has two of each, though once Los Angeles did. Cleveland had, for several years in the seventies, a “grand slam” – one team in each of the majors.) Of these, all but three have won at least one championship since 1990, and most have won one in the current decade. The three sad cities are Philadelphia, Seattle and Cleveland. The ‘76ers won in 1983, and the Super Sonics last won a championship in ’79. And Cleveland has been winless since the two days after Christmas, 1964 when the Browns beat the Baltimore Colts 27-0.

We’ve been suffering fifteen years longer.

But hey, surely there are other sufferers out there! Well, let’s be generous and roll in cities with only two major league teams. It gets only slightly tougher to complain. There are ten more cities with two major league franchises. Of these, Charlotte, Nashville and New Orleans have had no championships, ever. But – but! - in each of these cities, major league sports came to the city after Cleveland’s last championship: New Orleans just after, and Charlotte and Nashville within the last decade or so.

So they haven’t suffered longer.

Only one city has actually gone longer without a championship. San Diego, whose Chargers won an AFL League championship in ’63, one year before the Browns’ last NFL Championship. The Bills just miss, and squeak by with a ’65 AFL win. However if you, like my mom, consider the AFL to have been a minor league up until the beginning of the merger with the NFL – the first Super Bowl (technically, the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game that was later renamed Super Bowl I) in 1967 – then Cleveland is still the city with the most suffering.

ESPN agrees – a couple years back they voted Cleveland the most tortured sports city.

And I know from personal experience that this is true.

Okay, getting to the top stop took some help.

Like from Pittsburgh and Oklahoma most recently, but also Kansas and Arkansas, and in fact every unranked team that beat a top-five ranked team this year (all what? fifteen now?) starting with Appalachian State's crushing Michigan. (Excepting of course, Illinois.)

Go Bucks!

Here we see the secret heart of environmentalism.

it's kinda tricky to litter when you're going 1600mph.

There you are, minding your own business. Sitting on the La-Z-Boy, drinking a gin and tonic, watching the news channel most suited to your ideological preferences. Bamf! you are magically transported into the past. It’s 1939. What do you do?

That’s pretty much a no-brainer, really. Western Democracies v. Genocidal Nazis? You sign up for the duration, you pitch in for the big win. You convince someone or other in the government or military that yes, you are from the future, and no, you’re not a loonytoon. There’s lots of contributions you could make. You could tell the Navy that their torpedoes don’t work, and that somewhere in early December ’41, Pearl is going to get shellacked. You could tell the Army that the Sherman tank needs something bigger than a 75mm gun if it’s going to go up against the best that Germany has to offer. Warnings about the invasions of Poland, France, Crete, the USSR.

Lots you could do to make a positive impact. Of course, we won the war anyway, so no big deal if you take a nap, either.

What if you went back further? Its 1861, and again, pretty much a no-brainer. The Great Emancipator v. Slavery. Same deal – things turned out pretty well in the long run. The Union was preserved, and the rednecks and peckerwoods got their slaves freed. You could shorten the war though, if you could convince Lincoln that Little Mac was a poncy coward, and you need a hard-fightin’ general like Sherman in charge.

And what if you went back still further? Your barcalounger appears in a field south of Alexandria and it’s 1774. Which side do you pick? Heavy-handed and arrogant British colonial masters, or whiny, prickly, sensitive proto-rebels? I was pondering this the other day in the car, and I find that this isn't a no-brainer.

I’m an American, and I like being an American, and I think my nation is kick-ass. Well and good. But I am aware that the British weren’t being that unreasonable in asking the colonists to pitch in some of the costs for their own defense. But the American colonists were a prickly bunch, and jealous of their rights. And so, while the British demands were not in themselves unreasonable – let’s just say that the British didn’t exactly go out of their way to accommodate American opinion on the matter.

And that’s the nub of it right there. The Americans said, no taxation without representation. The British King and government said, stop being children. It was very much like Dad telling his teenage son he doesn’t get a vote on where the family goes for vacation, and the son goes off and sulks for eight years when the fam doesn’t go to Cancun or wherever Brooke Burke went on Wild On; and instead goes someplace sensible and boring like Disney World. Except instead of a good, thorough sulk under black lights, it was eight years of war.

Once things had more or less gone past the point of no return, things naturally got a little heated. The Declaration of Independence makes Great Britain and King George sound like what a Berkeley professor thinks of the United States and our current president. And both are occasionally technically accurate, but really missing the point. In 1776, Great Britain was one of (being generous) three nations in the entire world that had some form of representative government. So, like the patchouli-dipped Berkeley Prof, the colonists were ripping on the one nation in the world that was least tyrannical, least despotic, and least arbitrary in its governance.

We know what happens. In the end, it turned out all right. The sulky, black clad teen moves out of the house, and into slum housing on campus. He becomes friends with everyone his dad warned him about. Like France. He continues to have desultory fights with Dad, but distance makes it a little less painful. Eventually, the teen grows up, gets a job, and with some indirect help from Dad (maybe Mom slipped him some cash now and then) finds himself prosperous and much less pissed off at Dad. After a century or so, Dad and Son are best friends, present a united front to the rest of the world, and really can’t remember why they hated each other once.

While not exactly a new thought, what if it didn’t happen that way?

What might happen if the American colonies stayed inside the Empire? First, there would have to be changes in the Empire. By the 1770s, the Americans were probably a little too pissed off to make things easy. Yet, there were those in Parliament who were sympathetic to the American position – Fox, Burke, and others. Sadly, Pitt was to ill to be of much help. And none of them were in power. Franklin spent most of the immediate pre-war period in London, and spent most of that time trying to reconcile the two sides. All of these efforts were wasted on the stubborn intransigence of the British administration.

What could change that? I don’t know. The incompetence of the British Leadership more or less guaranteed that the war would happen, and then that the British would lose. And lord, was the British Leadership incompetent. A demonstration of the immediate effects of his frankly idiotic policies might have had an effect on King George – early on, the colonists felt that George was their ally against the corrupt Parliament, when nothing could have been farther from the truth. The king had absolutely no sympathy for the Americans. But he was taught and surrounded by idiots. Up to the last minute though, efforts at reconciliation were proceeding on both sides – with the advantage of hindsight, these could certainly have been strengthened.

The result? The American colonists considered themselves to be true British subjects – with the same rights and duties as their kin on that island off France. What if the Americans got representation in Parliament? That would have kicked the legs out from under the biggest complaint the colonists had. The travel time between the colonies and the metropolis would have been a problem, sure, but not an insurmountable one. And travel times were reduced quickly over the next half century anyway.

Later on, Britain considered several proposals for federalizing the empire, and some might actually have worked. An early solution, integrating colonies directly, would have laid a precedent for future colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealeand, South Africa would have been the most obvious beneficiaries. But the benefits might have spread to other less likely candidates like East Africa, China, India and even Ireland.

There was a window of opportunity there, in the late eighteenth century. Thumb-fingered leadership combined with an anomalous decline in the relative strength of the Royal Navy and the absence of a credible threat to the lives of the Americans happened just that once. Would the Americans have been able to bail in 1805, with Napoleon sending troops to the new world and Britain at risk? And by the end of the Napoleonic wars, the economies on both sides of the pond would have been well integrated. American troops would have fought in Wellington’s battles.

The only big question is that of slavery. Thing is, though, that the compromises embedded in the US constitution probably prolonged slavery long enough for the Civil War to happen – that, and the fact that for the first half of the Nineteenth Century, the North and the South were more or less evenly matched. Britain ended slavery earlier. And the South would not have been in a position to resist the entire rest of the Empire. Also, there would likely have been a more equitable solution – a phase out, buy out, or something. The Civil War might just be avoided altogether.

A federal empire might have been a more stable structure than the patchwork empire that Britain created over the Nineteenth century. And I don’t think that continued Union with Great Britain would have retarded, much, the eventual development of the industrial power of America. With that engine of production in their back pocket, England would have been able to bear the costs of Empire rather more easily.

Americans came late to the idea of Empire (aside from that whole manifest destiny thing) but that was because it didn’t suit our unique idiom. We were on the outside of Empire. On the inside, though – think of how the Scots helped, enthusiastically, create the British Empire. Would Americans have been different? Likely not. American missionaries, industrialists and soldiers of fortune working from inside the British Empire would be a substantial additional push.

With America on board, the Empire would have likely grown even more than it did over the course of the 19th century. Whereas American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean tended to be temporary, as a part of the British Empire, they might have been permanent. British interests in the Western Hemisphere would have been vastly greater. There might have been a Panama canal decades earlier. Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others could have fallen to the pink stain on the map. British presence in the Pacific would also likely have been greater.

On the flip side, those parts of the American Southwest that were taken from Mexico might not have – except for Texas. Though Texas might have remained independent. The Louisiana purchase wouldn’t have happened, but that territory would have been taken from the French over the course of the Napoleonic wars.

It would have been an interesting world at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. If I remember correctly, the United States and Britain had the two largest economies, with Germany a close third. If not, then something very similar to that. So, the combined Empire would be likely be on the order of twice as strong economically as its nearest competitor. A vast interior free trade market would encompass all of North America and Oceana, the Subcontinent, East and South Africa, the good bits of China, and of course the British Isles and a myriad tiny little places here and there.

WWI might have been a little different. Even more so if the Empire stayed on the sidelines while all the other powers wasted themselves.

On the pro-independence side, there is clearly much good, especially in the long term. The United States has been a powerful force for good in the world (yes, yes, despite many flaws – shut up) and it’s absence from the world scene over the last two centuries would lead to very large differences in the course of history. What would we miss? I think the most important would be the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – and even more to the point, the very thought that documents like these matter. A written constitution, with enumerated rights for people and restrictions for government is a very powerful, and very good idea. The United States, with its ideal of tolerance and assimilation to an ideal rather than an ethnicity is another huge plus. Would North America as a British colony still be a melting pot? Probably not so much.

Still and all, just imagining Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest of the Founding Fathers throwing down in Parliament with Burke, Fox and Pitt is just delicious. I still don’t know which side I’d want to help – but I think if the easy chair landed in 1760, I’d have tried to make sure there weren’t two sides.

The UK Telegraph came up with a list of the 100 most important Liberals and Conservatives. Bush didn't make the top 20, and Lieberman is the only man on both lists. There were no women, blacks or hispanics on either list.

In news which will surprise everyone but Ross, there's an anti-Republican bias in the media.

With cognac and spices, of course.

It seems that Ron Paul has the Botnet-American community in the bag.

A threesome of former NJ cops were complaining that the recent Denzel Washington film American Gangster twisted history so that it appeared in the movie that all of their work in busting Frank Lucas was done by Assistant Prosecutor Richie Roberts. Roberts seems apologetic. But I don't know, or really care, which one of these four did the work of busting Lucas - or if it was the NY cops, FBI or Martians.

What amused me was the comment from the criminal himself:

Lucas, who spent time on the New York movie set last year, said his conviction came not from information gathered in the 1975 raid, but from investigations that followed it.

"I'm not going to credit them with getting me," said Lucas, who became an informant under Roberts' prodding.

"Those three cops couldn't catch a cold."

Much hot air has been blown recently on the whole internet music/movie/copyright/ shenanigans. The music industry is being killed/is being saved by Apple's iTunes. Movie piracy is/is not killing movies. But has anyone thought of the porn industry? Their sacred copyright protections are being, uh, violated as much or more than music or less sexy movies. And while the smut peddlers were among the first to jump on the web bandwagon (and VHS before) they, like many other slightly more respectable businessmen, are finding it very hard to compete with "free."

Anyway, here is an interesting bit on how Web 2.0 and other buzzwords are if not killing, certainly maiming the porn bidness.

[wik] Apologies from the Ministry of Future Perfidy, the video and the account that created it on youtube no longer exist.

Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for the night. Light a man on fire, you keep him warm the rest of his life.

Did your mama hit you? Then you said it right.

Recently, my son has been exposed (as all children eventually are) to foul language, cursing, swearing, oaths, and the like. Surprisingly, little of this exposure has come from me. As responsible parental units, we have taken a moderate approach in discouraging the boy from dropping the F-bomb and its cousins. We don't freak out, we don't appear shocked and horrified; we just calmly beat the crap out of him, point out that it is impolite to say things like that, and that it is something that we generally don't do. This method has proven to be fairly effective.

The other day, I was watching a zombie flick late in the evening. The boy woke up, and we watched some brain munching for a bit. John pointed out, accurately, that there was a rather copious amount of bad words along with the brain eating. I explained that when people are scared, they often use bad words. (Screenwriters also use bad words when they are frightened by deadlines or being viewed as "inauthentic" or "not edgy.") This led to a discussion of the appropriate use of bad language.

The boy played with the envelope a little.

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm scared." No, not really.

"Okay, just when there's a spider." Nope. If it's dark. If my sister sits on me. If mommy doesn't buy me a toy. If I see Brittney Spears. If...

Well, I wanted to watch the rest of the movie. "It's time to go to bed, and not use bad words."

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm being chased by zombies."

"Son, you have my permission to use any bad word you can think of, as many times as you want." His eyes lit up with the possibilities.

"But only if the zombies come, and not before." Despair. "Now back in bed."

I was reminded of this incident when I ran across this little gem, from someone who takes a rather opposite approach to swearing for the very young:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to call him a “ball-draining cum junkie”. She should be able to deflect all those silly little schoolyard taunts by tossing off a casual “Lick my ass, fucktard.”

And if some boy says she has cooties, I want her to fire right back with “Yeah. Well, we’ll see how easy you say that when my cock’s in your mouth.” This doesn’t make any sense, of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

[wik] I realized, just as soon as Johno pointed it out, that my post was mysteriously truncated. In reconstituting the post, I realized that the text at the link is different from the quote above. Sometime between Thursday, May 15, 2003 4:55:06 PM and earlier this afternoon, Jeff Vogel bowdlerized (a bit) his own text. This is the new version on his website:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to lash out with an uninterrupted spray of obscenities, most of which will have no meaning to either her or her opponent. The enemy may not understand why he has just been called a “fucktard,” of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

How disappointing, and how glad I didn't empty the trash after I deleted the word doc that contained the original.

Erector sets are now classified as a weapons-grade munition and are illegal to export.

Coast to coast in 32 hours or less.

Facinating discourse on the redemptive and cathartic power of cursing.

It is a good day to be a Cleveland Sports fan. I have proof. Cleveland is often slighted by the national sports press - most recently, ESPN devoted nine minutes to analysing the aftermath of the Yankee's defeat in the first playoff series and mentioned the Indians not once. Granted, the possible demise of Joe Torre's storied career is significant. But really. The Yankees lost, the Indians won.

Between episodes like that, and the constant pain of watching highlight reals where, seven times out of ten, the victims of the highlighted star is a Cleveland team, it gets kind of annoying. Even when Cleveland teams do well, we still get ignored.

Yet, today was a good day. Looking at my Google News page, I scrolled down to the sports section, and look at this:

All three of the featured stories are about my teams. (Counting OSU as a Cleveland team, which is fair, I believe.) I've never seen anything like it before, and unless the NBA moves its opening day back to October - which is not totally implausible, given that their post season stretches into July - will never be topped.

Despite living more than a year quite contentedly without cable, I have summoned the cable minions to my home, because I think, hope, that I will have cause to watch the World Series this year. I may even buy a bigger tv.

[wik] I will note, however, that they still couldn't bear to put up a picture of someone in a Browns uniform.

I am well familiar with the brilliance and technical virtuosity of the guitarist Buckethead. Largely because his fans regularly email me to tell me how brilliant and virtuosoesque that other Buckethead is. I also sit amazed at the apparently stupendous sex appeal of a KFC chicken bucket worn on the head and the effect that it has on impressionable (and no doubt deeply disturbed) young females.

I have learned of another Buckethead, though, and one whose fans will likely never email me. The other day I picked up PJ O'Rourke's Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut at a second hand store in a dirty little Virginia town improbably set amidst some of the most beautiful countryside east of the Mississippi. It was shelved, appropriately enough, in the religion section.

PJ, apparently, had his own encounter with a buckethead almost thirty years ago in Marlette, Michigan:

Now motels are always cheery and attractive places, especially when you're sick, and, let me tell you, this particular motel is a monument to the art form. It's run by some semiretarded no-necked bucket-headed member of an Eastern European ethnic type so dim that they were driven to our shores by shame at the comparitive military success and intellectual brilliance of their Polack neighbors. We'd already had one conversation with this oaf:

"We have reservations for six rooms."

"Ve half only six rooms reserfed."

Right, we have reservations for six."

"Dere is no six of yous."

"The other people are in the cars outside."

In dose car? Dat is more dan six!"

"Look we're not all staying here. Only six of us. The rest are staying at the farm."

"Farm? No farm! Ve half only six rooms reserfed." And so on. His particular commetn to me had been, "Ve give you da room wif stuck storm door." ...

Bolted and chained in one corner was a color television set - by "color" I mean mostly orange - with reception as fuzzy as I was, and I lay there all night, too nauseated to sleep, watching movies like Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and Hercules Unzipped, plus three versions of our national anthem and one of Canada's and four varieties of sermonette (Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Total Immersion Baptist Evangelical Church of Christ), and, finally, something called the "Hog-Watch Sun-up Early Rural Feed and Price Pork Report" until I dozed off a little before six, Friday morning. At 6:15, there was a calamitous banging on the door. It was Buckethead, the landlord: "Dis storm door stick, you know!" Then he shoveled snow under my window for an hour.

The French have invented something cool, and it's the NYorker reporting it, natch.