Play: En Garde!

 Athena by Gracie Gardner, Directed by Kathryn Van Meter, presented in collaboration with Salle Auriol Fencing Club, Arts West, Through May 4. 

Back to the Junction in West Seattle. Dinner at our favorite sushi place, a desert donut at the nearby Top Pot (which was also hosting a local distillery for a tasting for rye whiskeys and berry liqueurs), and the Athena at the Arts West on its opening Friday. A play about two young women. And swordplay. A lot of swordplay.

Mary Ellen (Anteia Delaney) and the aforementioned Athena (Allison Renee) are 17-year old fencers training for nationals. Mary Ellen is dexterous, gangly and introverted, fencing to make herself look better for college. Solo-named Athena is strong, loud, and pushy, fencing to prove herself the best. Mary Ellen is from the burbs and wants to impress her parents. Athena is from the city and has a rocky relationship with her father. Both are socially maladroit. They start practicing together. And the play is about their relationship as they cross swords and words and emotions.

They're seventeen, and all the emotions are on the surface. The conversations just tumble out nonlinearly, with whipsaw changes in direction and hummingbird levels of attention. And through it all you see the bonds growing between them, as they both want the same thing, and very different things as well. You're supporting Mary Ellen at the beginning (she's the underdog of the pair), but come to appreciate Athena as well.

The play is presented in collaboration with the Salle Auriol Fencing Club. There have been a lot of such team-ups in West Seattle's productions, usually other entertainment groups but this is the first one for a fencing club. The single setting is the piste - the long strip that combat takes place on. The action orbits around the field of combat, but centralizes there. And the fencing is ... real good, and carries the plot forward as both young women change each other. 

And the Athena is ... good. I liked it but did not love it, but then, I have never fenced nor been a 17-year-old girl. The Lovely Bride DID love it, because in her storied history she was both. I found it well-written, well-acted, and well-presented. Arts West has produced another excellent evening of entertainment. 

 More later,

Play: Pick and Roll

The Great Leap by Lauren Yee, Directed by Eric Ting, Seattle Rep through 22 April.

True confession time: I've never been a big fan of basketball. I think my father took me to a game of the Pittsburgh Condors, before that team folded, but I never caught the bug for the sport. And my apathy is despite going to college in the middle of Indiana, where the March Madness sets in around February, and living just north of great maelstrom of the Chicago Bulls' championship seasons, AND having a younger sister who played college ball at Grove City. Basketball was very much a take-it-or-leave-it sport for me, and I knew just enough to hold my own in office water-cooler conversations.

That said, I want to say The Great Leap is a great play about basketball. And politics. And relationships.

Here's the summary - the play bounces between 1971 and 1989. In 1971 a boorish Saul (Bob Ari) , an American coach, arrives in Beijing to teach American-style basketball to the communists as part of the sports exchange (see ping-pong diplomacy). Said exchange was supposed to cool some of the heated rhetoric between the US and China. His interpreter/assistant coach is Wen Chang (Joseph Steven Yang) who is by-the-book, introverted, and has spent most of the Cultural Revolution keeping his head down and not attracting attention. In 1989, Saul, now facing the end of his coaching career after several losing seasons, is invited back for a game between University of San Francisco and Wen Chang's national team. And Manford (Linden Tailor), an undersized Chinese-American high school point guard wants to go to China on that team.

And to be honest, early on, things look dire, as the characters feel a little bit like caricatures in your typical sports story. Past Saul is an ugly American, and his relationship with Wen Chang echoes Uncle Duke and Honey from Doonesbury. 1989 Saul is a washed-up jock looking for redemption. Manford is the hot young kid, impatient for the rest of his life, hot-headed and opinionated, who may give Present Saul's team a chance in Beijing. The opening is humorous, but feels fairly traditional - a typical sports story of the plucky underdogs.

And then something happens. The play pivots. Yee unfolds the characters and shows their depth and reasons for being there. She plays fair with the audience - the clues are there as to why Manford really wants to go to China, what redemption Saul is looking for, and what motivates Wen Chang, but she lets them bubble up, so when you realize the hows and whys of the characters, it makes sense. And the action rises through to the final final shot of the game, reported by the ensemble in rapid-fire delivery that brings the viewers into the tension of basketball.

And that's saying something, since there are fewer actors on the stage than on the court. Ari and Yang are pitch-prefect in their roles, and Tailor sells the loudmouth-with-talent perfectly, skirting the edge of his own boorishness. Keiko Green as Connie operates as a support character for Manford as opposed to having her own arc, but holds her own. Yee brings all the pieces together both logically and, more importantly,  emotionally, and literally takes your breath away in the final moments of the game, as outside forces are moving against protesters in Tienanmen Square.

Leaving this photo by Jeff Widener of
Associated Press here. No particular reason.

The set is, of course, a basketball court, both in San Francisco and the arena of the US/China "friendship game". And the Rep continues its romance with action taking place on a higher stage as well, this time depicting Wen Chang's apartment with a view of the square. It works better here than in either The Humans or Ibsen in Chicago as the upper stage does not loom over the audience.

I am incredibly impressed with The Great Leap. It took its characters, and did not subvert them so much as deepened them and brought out their underlying humanity. It showed me a couple tricks I might want to fold into my own writing. This play will surprise you, and I think you'd enjoy it, even if you're not a fan of basketball.

More later,

Big Game, Big Story

Humans, we love our stories. It is something about us, our desire to make connections, to seek out links, to explain, that fuels a need to create narratives. It may be what defines us as humans. Something cannot simply exist. Events cannot simply occur. Things must have a reason. Actions must occupy a continuity. The world must have meaning over and above the obvious.

So, this weekend, there's a big football game. The champions of one group of teams (The Seattle Seahawks) will meet the champions of the other group of teams (The New England Patriots) in a head-to-head match up for all the marbles and bragging rights and rings and bonuses. And there will be music and fireworks and fans painting themselves and expensive commercials that you've probably already seen on YouTube and, I dunno, dancing bears.

And there will be stories.

In the two-week gap between determining the combatants and the game, something needs to fill time, and that becomes the narrative. Who are the white hats? Who are the black hats? Who are the upstarts? Who are the veterans? What does this say about the teams' home regions? What insights do we gain?

Looking at this year, and several past Super Bowls Seattle was a part of, the general feeling is that the mass media doesn't really get Seattle at all. We're quirky. We're tucked away in the northwest. Too much coffee. Too much rain. Young. Technie. Distracted by our phones. Not serious about our sports.

The first Super Bowl Seattle played in was against Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh's aura as a heavy-lifting steel town predominated (never mind that the biggest industry in medical services these days). The coverage was overwhelming about how the Steelers, who had the right stuff, would dominate the other guys, who would be the Seahawks (The Steelers won, confirming this narrative).

The second Super Bowl Seattle played in had a similar vibe. The opponent was the Broncos, under Payton Manning, and in the weeks leading up to the event, the national media treated it as a coronation of Mr. Manning as the Greatest Player Evah (And he IS real good) and the game as just a confirmation of that obvious fact. Seattle defeated the Broncos soundly in that game, leaving the media without a narrative and scrambling.

So you would think that, this time out, there would be a little more love for the Seahawks? Not so much. Most of the week has concentrated on the scandal of whether the Patriots kept their balls properly inflated. There is some real science about this, but pretty much it has gone in the direction you would expect it - people looking for reasons to say "The Patriots' Balls".

Reporting on the Seattle side? Not so much. The most news we get is about how on of our running backs (who IS real good) won't talk to the sports press, and one of our cornerbacks (who ALSO is real good) talks way too much. Our quarterback comes across as a nice, intense, dedicated. talented youngster, which as a result, apparently, makes for bad interviews and bad television (until he starts scrambling in the open and gives every fan in the stadium a heart attack).

So the story is yet again centered on the other team this year, with some factions fitting them for black hats and others being more charitable (in the manner that one expects charity when you are caught with your hand in the cookie jar up to your elbow) . We have not hit the level where the Patriots are playing for redemption quite yet, because that involves actually admitting there was anything wrong in the first place. And I should be happy from the standpoint that while all the news leans on the Patriot side, the previous Super Bowl champions are cruising along, effective underdogs for the very prize they took home the previous year.

And I don't think anyone has caught that particular narrative. Leading up to this, we kept hearing how teams that win the Super Bowl are not even expected to make the playoffs the next year, yet once Seattle did that, that entire line of thought died away. This is a rarity, but in a landscape scraping for any narrative that doesn't involve "The Patrtiots' Balls", I think the media missed the obvious story of a team of individuals coming together to win games.

I suppose I should be OK with the attention on the Patriots, given that the other big story from the media is that our running back (who, I may have mentioned, is real good) doesn't want to talk to them. And I will be watching the game with friends on Sunday. But I think the media blew it this time with their narrative, Again.

More later,

The Super Bowl Narratives

If there is something that makes humans human, it is our ability, no, our desire to find patterns. To make connections. To tell stories. It is something we are very good at, such that clouds become herds of horses, smatterings of stars become legendary heroes, and a handful of stats indicate the economy is going great/going to hell in a handbasket due to the high ethics/moral bankruptcy of those involved.

And now, the Superb Owl. Championship game of the NFL. And that is not just enough, of course. It must have deeper meaning than merely men contending for a prize, and as a result, we see the rise of the Narrative. 

This year, the game is between my hometown Seattle Seahawks and the Peyton Mannings. Yes, it really is the Denver Broncos, but despite the fact that Denver has a plethora of excellent players (none of whom come to mind at the moment), every bit of coverage is going to be about the legendary quarterback who is going to a Superbowl representing a completely different city than his last time.  In fact, we can use a Manning-base Bechdel test here - You have to find an article that a) is about the Broncos, b) is about a player who is not Manning, and c) does not mention Manning and that player's relationship to Manning. Have fun.

Note that even our local weather expert, Cliff Mass, falls prey to this - comparing how well the Seahawks as a team do in aggregate against how well Peyton Manning does in sub-zero weather. Sigh. 

On the other side, the Seahawk articles will follow the traditional overlapping trinities found at this time of year. One player is chosen from the following categories - Quarterback, Running Back/Receiver, and Defender. There will be other players who are very, very good at their jobs, but we look at those positions, and then overlay the approved personality traits - The Cute One, The Loud One, and the Tough One.

Think I'm kidding? Look no further than the championship Steelers of my youth, with Bradshaw (Quarterback, Loud), Franco Harris (Cute (well, suave), Receiver), and Mean Joe Greene (Tough, Defender). It is a pattern, one the Narrative  thrives upon.

And if you have to talk about a fourth player, you talk about the kicker. The kicker is the Ringo of the holy trinity, and doesn't need to have a singifying trait. 

So, for the 'Hawks, we have Wilson (Cute, Quarterback), Sherman (Loud, Defender), and Lynch (Tough, Running Back). We have a lot of extremely talents players (Kearse, Baldwin, Tate and the holy ghost of Harbin who will player a full quarter sometime this season), but those first three will be the stories. Along with the "character" of the team.

See, the last time Seattle went to the Superbowl (against Pittsburgh), the team was considered too NICE to be there. Seattle was a bunch of reasonable nerds with pocket protectors that would be mugged by the smashmouth, down and dirty, hard working type of football that Pittsburgh played. And indeed, that narrative played into a couple questionable calls that Seattle remembers bitterly to this day (Not that this seeking of redemption will be part of the Narrative - the Narrative does not like to examine the mistakes of the Previous Narratives). 

This time, the Narrative is shaping up the other way. Seattle is the black hats. We're the bad boys, the loud mouths, the chippy trash-talkers. The coach looks the other way for violations and the team has been heavily penalized. They are the scrapyard dogs, the fans are loud and obnoxious, they play nasty. They are almost ... Oakland. This is an 180 degree flip from the last time. But don't ask the Narrative about this - the Narrative moves in its own, private ways.

So look for these things in the next week as the hype engines fire up, and the sports folk talk about Russel Wilson's boyish good look and how uncouth our team is. And most of all, the Narrative will be how it will all be for naught as Peyton Manning and his team, the Peyton Mannings, cruise to victory. Until they don't.

More later, 

Olympics

I've spent the past few days wrestling with a nasty headcold, which has manifested with an ever-rotating cascade of symptoms like a demonically-possessed Simon game (Today - sore throat! Tomorrow - uncontrollable coughing!).

And worst of all, when I'm sick like this, I sing. Badly. And not good songs, either, usually bits of doggerel made up on the spot, or things like the Donny Most song from that Family Guy episode:

Donny Most, Donny Most

He was "Ralph" on Happy Days

Donny Most, Donny Most

Now he rises from the haze.

So its not a good idea for me to be around others, and I've been working at home for the past couple days. Now, the fact that this coincides with the Olympics, which are being broadcast by the network nation of NBC, is completely beside the point. So the fact I can curl up and let the TV run while I slurp down hot tea and review manuscripts is totally a small bonus.

As you've probably heard, it has been a snakebit Olympics. Warm weather. Tough venues. A fatality in the luge. Protesters. Breakdowns in equipment and transportation. The torch trapped behind a chain link fence like it was in Free Speech Zone. Still, it is the Winter Olympics, and I've always liked the Winter Games more than the Summer. Skiing, speedskating, hey, I'll even watch figure skating. And adding the polar cold-weather opposites of curling and snowboarding just adds icing to the cake.

And I've been happy with the coverage. One of the grumbles in Seattle right now is that we get the games in the evening NBC feed instead of live. Vancouver is two hours away (plus an hour at the border) - why are we getting everything on tape delay. Me? I'm glad I don't have to watch the announcers fill time for two hours while the IOC Judges are on the women's alpine course praying for snow, or waiting for the fog to lift so you can see the top of the course from the bottom.

As much as I bash on large corporatism, the network nation of NBC has done a good job so far - highlights in the evening in prime, and live/semi-live events during the day on CNBC, MSNBC, and USA. And while they cut some of the action (like the opening rocks for curling each end), they have been showing full games (which is just as well, since the US team is 0-3 in the round robin and not looking at all well - will there still be coverage when the US is no longer a contender?). In addition, NBC has eschewed the mawkish sentimentality and jingoism that often haunts Olympic coverage.

So for the moment I've got my laptop, manuscript, blanket, and tea, and I'm happy the Olympics are on - because otherwise the only thing on TV would be reruns of "Phineas and Ferb".

Donny Most, Donny Most

Sunday Monday, Happy Days.

More later.

Quids Today

So I'm walking through the UW Campus, looking for the giant head of Edvard Grieg (but that's a story for another time). When I come across the following (click to embiggen).


Here's a closer look -



The goalie is standing in front of three hoop-shaped goals. She is riding a broom. In fact, all the players are have brooms between their thighs as they run around with a number of balls.

Quidditch. They are playing quidditch.

I'm not quite sure how to react to this. If you were 8-10 when the first Harry Potter books came out, you'd be about college age now.

But watching a large pitch of fans cheering on the game makes me miss the more gentile, reasonable sports of an earlier generation, now abandoned. Ones that were creations of masses as opposed to being presented in popular fiction. Immortal games of contest that we could truly call our own.

You know, like frisbee golf.

More later,

Penguins

So the Pittsburgh Penguins rallied and took the Stanley Cup in seven games from the hated Red Wings. Bwah-hah-hah!

And in other penguin-related news, Janna has created a customized penguin for the Woodland Park Zoo's Penguins on the March exhibit. Her Cleopenguin is brilliant!

Penguin trifecta now in play. More later,

Update: Mike Selinker completes the trifecta with this Video of a penguin going shopping. Those who bet on the penguin trifecta please pick up your winnings at the window.

XLIII, Um, Also

In well over a thousand posts here, I have never been as tempted to retract an entry as I am for the one just down the page, in which I intimated that this year's Super Bowl would be a slaughter and, as so many before them, a snooze.

Instead, it proved to be the most watchable game I've seen in years, from start to finish. And this is the Super Bowl, mind you, where usually the results are obvious before the end of the first quarter and those of you with picture-in-picture channel surf during the game, coming back only for the commercials (if that).

All my hopes and fears about the Steelers, emotions I thought in abeyance, came back in full force as I watched them dominate in the first quarter and completely evaporate in the early fourth. The great moves were there, in amazing play after amazing play on both sides, along with the amazing bonehead move (Ah - the Steeler center is named Justin Hartwig, though he probably would have had to change his name after that holding penalty in the end zone that gave Arizona the safety.

Even the halftime show of Bruce Springsteen and the Half-of-Jersey band was brilliant, as if the NFL has once and for all shaken the curse of the obviously-sucky-half-time-show.

Oh, and the commercials? A lot of people got pushed in front of buses this year. The Budweiser Clydesdales should get their own show on NBC, and Pepsi will never be the choice of a new generation if they keep insisting on claiming that it was the choice of every previous generation. Just saying. There were even movies I will want to watch this year. Oh, and the worst of the lot was a tie between the GoDaddy hey-we're-still-around commercials and the Cash4Gold people who reminded us that MCHammer was still alive.

Though I liked the Ivar's commercial on the local. So, why a duck?

The game was officiated well, if a little over-officiated, but some of those calls you just have to make (come on, punching out an opponent?). Yeah, I can't argue with the calls (OK, there was that one Arizona TD, but...)

More later,

XLIII

Obligatory Super Bowl post.

I'll keep it short, mainly because I haven't caught much of the buzz and none of the hooplah. Part of it is because our local media is in such an uproar, but also because I haven't felt much of a media through-line, a moral story that makes this game the ultimate justification of whatever needs to be justified. There doesn't even seem to be a strong us-versus-them line of that-which-makes Pittsburgh mighty versus whatever-it-is-that-makes Phoenix great.

Snow versus sun? Steelworkers versus retirees? Some great player's final hurrah? It just doesn't have the natural dualism that previous games seem to have had. There just is a shrug and a feeling that the Cardinals meeting the Steelers are like those turkeys meeting the shredder in that Sarah Palin video. And watching the commercials will have that tinge of 'So THIS is what they laid five hundred people off for'.

In Seattle, I am getting the whiff of sour grapes - heck, its a spoiled vineyard out here. We should have been at the top of our no-challenge division, but managed to lose to the Cards and destroy the whole Super Bowl as Holgren's last hurrah line that the media would have loved. And Seattle is just a tad bitter that whenever the national media talks about the Steelers, it is always in terms of "The Steelers, who have not been to a Super Bowl since they kicked the Seahawks to the curb, ate their lunch, and gave them a collective wedgie." So yeah, there's a little bitterness here.

I'm a native of the 'Burgh from before they started calling it "the 'Burgh". I'll root for the hometown team, but I haven't been there for them the most of the season. I don't know the center's name (yeah, most Steeler fans do. Most Steeler fans know the center's mother's maiden name). I fear I in this battle I am a sunshine Steeler, a summer soldier, a good-time fan, my terrible towel somewhere in with the napkins and the silverware. I expect a quiet Super Bowl, with an unexpected Steeler win.

Now watch the sports gods prove me wrong.

More later,

Beisbol Been Good to Me

It occurs to me that I've gone to more games at Safeco Field than at the mythological Forbes Field (a hazy memory of childhood) or at Three Rivers Stadium (a multi-use facility that made baseball a radio sport for me). But one of our folk at the company had four tickets to last night's Mariner's game he could not use and gave them to co-worker Steve, who took his wife Reyna and invited me and Albert along.

And it was a lot of fun. The Mariners, after glorious pre-season hopes, have dived to the bottom of their division, They were playing the Cleveland Indians, who after a promising start are in similar straits. Yet the stadium has a healthy multitude for this first game after the All-Star-Break, filled with group packages and hardcore fans and people taking advantage of a cloudless, warm Seattle evening.

The seats are along the first base line, about 20 feet past first, 27 rows back. Great location for watching the batters. There's a family of four in front of us, and behind us a pair of married couples. The guy behind me I mentally label "The Vet" since he speaks at length before the game about action his unit had seen in Europe in WWII. He was born in Cleveland, and has his hopes. Steven and Reyna both flip out their Nintendo DS's and hook up with the wifi in the stadium for stats and promotions. Later on, they order food through their game machines. Me, I'll wait for the headsup display mounted in my glasses. I hoof it and get a massive pile of garlic fries and a beer that costs almost as much.

The game was one of those good ones - the Mariners caught fire and won, 8-2. Four of those runs came off a grand slam bases-loaded homer by Raul Ibanez, a thing of beauty that sailed over the back fence without even a hope of being caught. The entire crowd rose as it powered out of the park, and I will admit to shouting "Kiss it goodbye!" (Pittsburgh reference)as it departed this world for that of baseball statistics and day-after reporting.

It was Felix Hernandez bobble-head night, but given the current status of the teams, it was also fan-foul-ball-accumulation night, as the seats along both baselines were shelled throughout the proceedings. Reyna at the far end of our group was next to a cluster of empty seats and almost got nailed as a foul pinballed around the ghosts. Another foul came to me, but too high and too steep. I couldn't get it, but turned to see where it went.

And there was the Vet, his hands closed together. And he opened them, to reveal the ball, nested like a bird's egg in his palms. He gave the ball to a wide-eyed kid in his row, and the rest of the section congratulated him both on the catch and his generosity. And we did the wave and argued about the origin of the wave (Reyna checked wikipedia, but I disagree with their conclusions). The Vet grumbled about how back the Indians were stinking up the joint. His wife hugged him. The crowd was in that fine mood that only a six-run lead We ate garlic fries and cheered ourselves hoarse, watched the roof slide shut after the game, and got caught in a massive traffic jam getting out of the lot (Safeco is a great field, but those same trains that you hear blaring past the stadium also block all traffic when the game lets out).

All in all, a great evening. Baseball was very, very good to us.

More later,

Stanley Cup

I am no great hockey fans (I had to go look up icing in the wikipedia), but I am very, very proud of the Pittsburgh Penguins, despite their loss. Go Pens!

More later,

Sonic Bust

I'm not a big basketball fan - I remember my dad taking me to Pittsburgh Condors game at Civic Arena before that ABA team was disbanded in the early 70s. But as a Seattle native I must note the end of the regular NBA season, which was the Seattle SuperSonics worst and probably last.

Here's the tale for those with better things to do: the Sonics were owned by a large group of investors headed by Howard Schultz, the guy behind Starbucks. They sold it to a group of investors from Oklahoma City headed by Clay Bennett. At that time there was many promises of how they were not planning on moving the franchise to Oklahoma. This was followed by a series of outrageous non-negotiable demands (such as building the most expensive NBA venue in history in Renton), at which point, sadly, Bennett's bunch decided they had to move the team, and are currently waiting only for NBA approval, which they should get, since Bennett is a big fan of NBA head David Stern and vice versa.

It is all such a pity, they said, and oh, can you let us out on the rest of our lease in Seattle? Thx Bye!

Well, of course, now it turns out that the new owners were always planning to move the team, as revealed in a bunch of emails that have been turned over in a court case between the city and Bennett's brood, And these emails show an almost-Enron-level of glee in the fact that they were lying to everyone outside the group while giggling amongst themselves about how they were putting one over on the rubes in the Pacific Coast. And they are not wrong - everyone who believed them got bamboozled. So Schultz (remember him?) is now suing to get the team back, since the Oklahoma group failed to negotiate in good faith.

Good faith. That's going to be a hard one to prove, since some of the new investors are from the energy industry. They can use the argument "Well, you knew we were scumbags when you made the deal with us," and offer ample proof.

Anyway, the Sonics have gone through a horrible season. There are 82 games in the regular season (Before going to the playoff season, which rivals the Stanley Cup in that it lets almost everyone in). The Sonics won 20 of them, less than a quarter of the total, many in late-game swoons that made it appear Key Arena was equipped with a diving board. Surprisingly, this is NOT the worst record in the NBA - that belongs to Miami (This just in - Miami has a basketball team). And its now becoming pretty clear that no one involved in the actual game - fans, professionals, announcers - wants the team to go.

So stay tuned, it will continue to unspool in the realm of the rich people. At least we got the Storm back, and they managed to break even this year.

More later,

UPDATE: The NBA owners voted 28-2, to approve the Sonics moving to Oklahoma City. Voting against were the Maverick's Mark Cuban and the Trailblazer's Paul Allen.

Sports Desk

We've been blissfully immune out here on the other coast to the huggamugga surrounding Super Bowl XLII. Given a choice between the narratives of "The Undefeatable Patriots" and the "Boston and New York hate each other", the media understandably embraced the latter. Works for me, since we like to ignore the pair of them.

Meanwhile, over in pro basketball, the Sonics snapped a 14-game losing streak, which most of the fandom have concluded is a plot by the new owners to cheese everyone off so we'll let them relocate to the Oklahoma City. Oh, and a while back the owners released a study declaring that losing the pro team will have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on local business.

This is particularly interesting, since when they were asking for a ton of money from the state, they were touting self-funded studies that showed that Pro teams ADDED to the economy in all sorts of gray, fuzzy ways. Yet when they have their bags packed? No, you won't even know we're gone.

Finally, the Seattle Times has done an excellent series on our college football team, in which those in power looked the other way on criminal activities in order to keep their stars on the team. What is interesting is that one of those responsible for soft-pedaling the charges is our new Prosecutor, Dan Satterburg, which the Times Endorsed just three months previously. Gee, maybe that's news we could have used at the time.

More later,

Scam

So this happened to a friend I work with, and his story bears wider dissemination.

One of my co-workers wanted to take his girlfriend to last Saturday’s Seahawks/Redskins playoff game. He bought tickets through StubHub, which is a reseller owned by E-bay. Stubhub provides a forum where folk wanting to sell tickets (who used to be called “scalpers”) hook up with ones wanting to buy them (who used to be called “marks”). More convenient than hanging outside Heinz field in a snowstorm saying “I got two”.

The order is made. The next day, a Fed Ex envelope arrives from the seller – empty. An empty FedEx envelope. My friend makes a phone call to StubHub. Questions are asked. Reassurances are offered. Simple mistake. Seller forgot to put them in. Will send you a pdf that can be used.

My friend is no fool – contacts Seahawks ticket office and dconfirms that, yeah, the pdf will work. They just need the barcode to scan into their system. Friend gets the pdf two days before the game.

Still no fool, he and his girlfriend show up early for the game. The bar code scans. They’re let in. They hang out, get something to eat, then head for their seats.

Which are occupied. By a nice couple from Moses Lake (their first Seahawk game). Who have the real physical tickets. ALSO purchased off StubHub.

And the couple is very nice. They offer to share. Each couple takes one seat. It works out – no one is sitting down during this game. A good time was had. My friend buys them lunch. What he doesn't know is if there was anyone else stuck at the front gate with duplicated tickets.

After the game, he comes back and fires off a blistering email to StubHub. Current status: A claim has been filed. Hoperfully StubHub does the right thing. And hopefully they are having a few choice words with the scammer who tried this. Hopefully involving hammers to the kneecaps.

In the meantime, as the playoffs continue, Buyer Beware. Be Aware and Be Prepared.

More later,

Ongoing Commentary

Notes from all over, personal to national (because otherwise I will just get too far behind):

Sacnoth, better known as Tolkien scholar John Rateliff, has his magnum opus on The Hobbit reviewed by theLA Times.

Monkey King, also known as Wolf Baur, has been getting a lot of good press for Kobold Quarterly, now in its third issue. Notes from Wired, Cinerati and Velvet Dice Bag.

Guild Wars won a Reader's Choice award from MMORPG.com. Go us! (Why yes, Sacnoth Valley WAS named after the gentleman in entry one).

Writer's Strike: New weirdness, United Artists got a exemption from the Writer's Guild, similar to Letterman's World Wide Pants (that is, they agree to the Guild's terms NOW). Sort of points out that WGA's demands are not all that unreasonable. The thing is, UA is owned in part by Sony, one of the Bigs. So is Sony sending out a signal that its ready to deal? Or are its people not sufficiently influential that UA can chart its own course?

Floods in Chehalis: United Way - out of money. FEMA - grinding slow.

Basketball. The Storm is staying, and will soon be outdrawing the sooner-to-be-Sooners Sonics.

Scaife: Interviews with both parties in Vanity Fair. Kid-gloves soft treatment, pointing out the raw hypocrisy but not letting the comments stick. Humanizes the participants, but reminds you that they are not humans you'd want to hang around.

Economy: What the freaking heck is happening with the stock market? The DOW is like 1000 points off its recent high. Is anyone paying attention?

Local Politics: Two months after the election, it turns out there WAS fraud and abuse at the Port of Seattle. Good thing we got rid of one of the reformers on the board.

National Politics: To quote scriptwriter William Goldman: "Nobody Knows Anything". Glad I don't feel obligated to play pundit on a regular basis. It is, however, making for an interesting ride.

More later,

The Chronics

So last night a number of my co-workers attended the Sonics home opener. I didn't make it, but good seats were still available and scalpers were spotted visibly weeping.

The house was apparently 2/3rds full, which was a surprise given that the Sonics management was promoting the game with all the stealth usually reserved for a state legislator's pay raise. The game itself was described as three quarters of good basketball, followed by a complete self-destruct similar to that experienced in their season opener the day before.

And even the most die-hard fans among my friends accused the Sonics of taking a dive.

Here's the deal, for those outside the Sound. The Sonics were bought last year by a group out of Oklahoma, who publicly pledged that they would love, simply love, to keep the team in Seattle, as opposed to moving it to smaller-market OKC, a town which is best known as a site of right-wing terrorism and, in a bit of trivia, the aerial bombing of the poor (An aviator in the 20's bombed the black neighborhoods with dynamite).

Upon purchase of the Sonics, the new owners proceeded to demand the most expensive arena in the NBA, and when the fandom proved to be insufficiently stupid, declared that they have exhausted all options and have no other choice but to make the move and could-you-let-us-out-of-the-lease-early-thanks? The city was less than accommodating, winning the point in court and forcing the new owners to appeal to the NBA, who will gladly junk the agreement to keep their owners happy.

Mind you, in the midst of this, own of the owners had the poor judgment to publicly state that they were never planning on hanging around, anyway, and those rubes in Seattle were just being strung along. The other owners declared this a misstatement. Uh-HUH.

So now, to show that Seattle doesn't have the heart to love a major league team, they are delivering crap-tastic basketball in the hopes of driving as many fans away as possible, thereby expediting their escape to the heartland. And they have sent the message they will keep on losing until they get what they want, regardless of the desires of the fans or the players. Good game, guys.

Me, I don't care much about B-Ball except when my kid sister was playing (go Grove City!), but it strikes me as perfect local sport for local heroes and talented college kids, not an game of industrialized powers. But the owners have been jerking the city around from Day One, and having turned some of their most dedicated fans into suspicious antagonists (two lawsuits are already pending), they should not be surprised that no one around here has a handkerchief for their crocodile tears.

Oh, and it turns out that an investors group from OKC is ALSO sniffing around the Pittsburgh Penguins. Just so you know.

More later,

UPDATE: So one of my co-workers showed a small (quarter of a page) flier that was being handed out, with the Save Our Sonics logo and the office phone number of NBA head David Stern. Yes, he called, which apparently neither the NBA nor the SOS (who did not approve the use of the logo) appreciate. How frustrating it must be to let the fans interfere with letting the team flee the city!

The I-65 Superbowl

So this year, at least, I'm not at all conflicted. Last year, it was my home town (which bleeds black and gold) against my adopted city (which is proud of the fact that it is louder, and that part of the reason is engineering behind their stadium). This year, no prob. Da Bears over the Colts.

I was in Lake Geneva during the years of the Super Bowl Shuffle (the 'Hawks, by the way, never got a goofy themesong, which puts them behind Pittsburgh, where every freakin' radio station had its own "Go Steelers" song), so even though everything has changed (except the owner's family), there is still enough good will in my heart to root for them.

The Colts, on the other hand are not only from Indy. Indy is a city which has improved in the last twenty-five years remarkably, but alas, I have not lived near it for twenty-five years, so for the same reason I am positively disposed towards Chicago from great pizza, great museums, and a great lakefront, I am similarly disinclined to support Indy from the memories of a downtown closed at 8 PM Friday and a grimy, hostile environment. Even though Purdue, my Alma Mat, was poised between the two metropoli, my interests were always more northern than southern. But there is another reason from the past to root against the Colts.

It is a traitor team. Back in 1984, the Colt owners backed the truck up to the stadium in the dead of night, loaded everything up, and were across state lines before the loyal fans knew what hit them. That simple. They booked out. Cut and run. Now, I think Manning is a better quarterback than Grossman, but the taint of blue horseshoe remains. When I was growing up, there were old baseball fans who never forgave the Dodgers for moving to LA in '58, even if they weren't Brooklyn fans in the first place. It was the principle of the thing, and even with the passing years and changes of management, they would not forgive.

Yeah, I can understand that. Indy is a better place than it was 25 years ago, but I just can't let them off the hook. So I'll be rooting for Da Beloved Bears when the time comes.

More later,

More Snow Madness

So this morning Steve Miller, who writes nifty reviews on unreviewable movies here, slipped on the ice outside his apartment complex and broke his ankle. While otherwise immobilized, he did manage to call us on his cell, and a good chunk of the day was taken up with helping out with the ER, rapidcare visit, prescriptions and other minor matters that occur when a friend fractures his fibula.

It is not that surprising that Steve was laid up, given that the snow we had early in the week hung around through surprisingly cold temperatures, and that the apartment complex management apparently thought that the polished ice surface they generated in the parking lot was some sort of benefit to their tennants. As a result of the running around, I had to be in and out of that parking lot three times, and each time I briefly lost control of the vehicle to a ice-bound skid (I learned to drive in Pittsburgh and spent a fair share of my life in Wisconsin, so I knew the drill about turning into the skid and generally heading for dry asphalt). And each time, at the entrance to the parking lot, there was some benighted fool from warmer climes (like California) who was struggling to get his minivan up the rise and out onto the main road. The surprise would be not that Steve was injured, but that there were not more such injuries from the complex's ice-bound negligence.

Once out of the parking lot, the main roads were fairly dry, with just enough ice in the shady parts to make it all an adventure. There have been two types of drivers this week - those driving way too fast for conditions, and those driving way too slow. As a result, it has been the ice capades combined with demo derby.

And through it all, I got the Seahawks game on a second audio channel while dealing with other matters. The game on in the background of the waiting room of the rapid care facility. The practitioner in the ER getting a phone call, saying "Yes!", then hanging up. (I had to ask "Seahawks score?" and she nodded). The Fred Meyers where I picked up the prescription had the game on in the electronics department, but only on the radio (they couldn't access the TV feed, apparently). In many ways, it felt like we were in the "B" plot of the episode while the Seahawks were the "A" plot. The upside was that the ER and rapid care units were pretty empty when we came in, since everyone else was watching the game. When I finally got home, I turned on the tube to hear words, "" ...and we'll be speaking with Coach Holgren about his disappointing loss."

But Steve is now resting comfortably (I hope), with his leg up and his bloodstream enhanced with an anti-inflammitory and a couple Limbaughs. And if he is reading this, we're rooting for him, and note that he should have his leg up, even if he's cruising the net. Now!

More later,

Da Bears

So, another football game where I am conflicted.

Part of it is that I don't shed football teams over time. I grew up in Pittsburgh, so I'm a Steeler fan. I lived in southern Wisconsin, in a town which precisely straddled the line between Bear country and Packer land, so I'm partial to those two teams. And now I'm in Seattle, so I am swept up in 12th Man Madness.

But the chances of one team I like fighting it out with another team I like has gone up over the years. Last year's Super Bowl was a mixed blessing, and I for one am glad that Pittsburgh won, particularly since they flushed away the season this year. I am also pleased that the Hawks have already defied expectations by surviving the wild card game and getting into the "real playoffs". I'm still going to watch the game -the 'hawks have been playing cardiac-attack football of the style that made the classic Bears seasons a combination of excitement and raw panic.

I don't know what it is about the NFL that inspires such brand loyalty. I don't root for the MLB teams the same way - Pirates and Brewers and Cubbies. Part of that may be that those teams I connected very strongly with their on-air radio personalities - Bob Prince and the Gunner for the Pirates, Bob Uecker, and Harry Cary. The voices stay with you, and were a source of continuity over the long seasons. Football, its more coaches and franchise players, with the bright spots appearing over the season.

I can say that I'll be happy no matter who wins, but I will really feel sorry for the losing side. So like I said, I'm conflicted.

More later,