Angst trifecta

Got beat again playing doubles yesterday (new racket notwithstanding), George Carlin died, and Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” is stuck in my head. If that don’t just mean it’s Monday.

Overhyped

I feel obligated to respond to the suggestion that LeBron James is not overhyped, as I claimed over here.

A short discussion of semantics is called for as a preliminary. Labeling James overhyped has nothing to do with whether he’s a good basketball player; it would be downright idiotic to claim that he has no skill or talent. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s about the hype. In the immortal words of Public Enemy, don’t believe it.

First, he hasn’t actually achieved anything. And no, I don’t believe for a second that a player has to win a championship to be considered an excellent player. But consider the attention James gets, the adulation, the seemingly unconditional love and attention. And consider what he has delivered in return.

Second, he receives insane levels of preferential treatment from the refs and the league. He travels to the basket all the time. Players who foul him receive harsh punishments; when he metes out similarly flagrant fouls on other players, he is protected from the consequences.

Third, he’s just a lousy representative of the NBA. Do I have to bring up the Darfur thing again? He’s a manufactured superstar who has done very little to earn respect for what he does, but rather seems to just sit back and let the league crown him as king because they need individuals to feed their hype machine.

Really, how can he not be seen as overhyped at this point? It will be very interesting to watch the Cleveland-Boston matchup in round 2. I hope KG goes easy on the poor guy; he has such a tough time getting fouled while he’s traveling his ass towards the basket.

Alternative minimum schmack

It’s that most momentous of days today, tax day. Funny how income tax in the US reveals so much about us, both in general and individually. Let’s start with the former and move to the latter, in an orderly, linear fashion that upholds the spirit of the tax forms themselves.

First, I noticed that it was a complete mob scene at the post office yesterday, which suggests that a lot of my fellow Americans are just as procrastinatory as I am. Although my rationalization for sending my taxes in at the last moment is that I’m putting off giving up my money as long as possible, so that I can earn a little more interest. However, that was probably more than offset by the extra stamps I randomly put on the envelopes to avoid waiting in the huge line to buy the exact postage. So that again shows a collective lack of planning by me and my fellow countrymen—another valuable insight.

I also thought about the common wisdom about a few tax-related topics, and by common wisdom here I of course mean stubborn ignorance. The best example of this is the deduction for interest paid on a home mortgage. People often like to blather about the wonderous shower of money that rains down upon you when you own a home, because hey, you can deduct the mortgage interest off your taxes! But hello, if you think about this for two seconds, you realize that you aren’t making any money. You’re just not paying tax on top of the interest that you already paid. In other words, you’re getting kicked in the head, but not stomped on the foot. I suppose that could be seen as a net gain in the optimist’s world. Speaking of optimism, viewing a tax refund as a good thing is a bit wack in my mind. Congratulations, you’ve been giving the government a free loan of your money rather than saving it yourself. This in the same country where people shriek about being trapped in a nanny state when it comes to things like wearing a seatbelt, or being allowed to blow cigarette smoke in other people’s faces.

Now to some specifics. I learned (once again) that I am exercising a smart career choice by not being an accountant or tax professional. I made two giant, honking errors in my first draft of the tax forms, which would have cost us some $1100. That ain’t too cool. I also am finally coming to grips with the reality that I should really get some damn tax software to figure all this stuff out, rather than doing it by hand. There’s just some persistent, crazy corner of my brain that doesn’t trust that the software is any better at this than I am; or rather, that a roomful of programmers, all equally or perhaps slightly less smart than I am, could actually achieve a better result than I with my pencil and my calculator. Hell, Danielle cheerfully reported to me that in New Zealand the government figures your tax for you, and then sends you a check or a bill. Can you imagine this working in the US? People here are suspicious of the freaking census, for chrissakes.

Anyway, I hope the Postal Service enjoys my extra fifty cents or so of postage. I wonder if I can deduct that off my taxes next year. Just think, that’s free money!

Speechless

Here’s what Mitt Romney said yesterday when he dropped out of the presidential race:

I disagree with Senator McCain on a number of issues, as you know. But I agree with him on doing whatever it takes to be successful in Iraq, on finding and executing Osama bin Laden, and on eliminating al-Qaeda and terror. If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

What a tool. What a huge tool. Yeah, that’s not exactly reasoned political debate on my part, but the implication that voting for a Democrat is equivalent to “surrendering to terror” is so beyond batshit crazy that it’s hard to respond in a rational manner. It’s this kind of laughable rhetoric that makes me wonder how anyone takes these people seriously. (Although not enough people considered Romney worth taking seriously, so maybe that’s something.) The fearmongering worked in 2004, but since then it has seemed as though Americans were finally getting a clue regarding the current administration’s corrupt mismanagement. I can only hope that Romney chose his words less for their general impact and more as a coded message to the conservative base that he’s still willing to drink the crazy juice. Damn, what a freak show American politics is.

P.S. I’m also irritated that text after my blockquotes is always formatted all nasty. What gives?!

A bit of rantiness

Awright, a few things large and small that are torquing me today.

1. Dude on the bus who rides all the way to the last stop, but stands right at the front for the whole trip. Every poor soul who wants to get on or off before the last stop has to squeeze by this guy even though there are acres of space further back where he could stand. Hey prick, think of someone besides yourself for twenty whole minutes, ok?


2. I can only read Glenn Greenwald every couple of weeks, to keep my teeth-grinding to a minimum. Bombing Iran? A politicized military? Crazy Rudy Giuliani and his defense of torture? It keeps me up at night.


3. Caitlin Flanagan. Why, why, why does the Atlantic keep printing her silliness? I cannot stand her self-centered, frail flower of womanhood crap. A blog would serve her so much better, where she could blab about herself without having to maintain the pretense that she’s writing about topics of broad relevance.


4. The phishing email I got today that included my email address, my eBay ID, and my full name. What the hell is that? Time to change a few passwords and hope for the best. And let’s see if I get any kind of response from eBay now that I’ve reported it to them.

A little catch-up

It’s been way, way too long since I posted, sorry about that. I’ve been waiting for a theme to surface that covers the last couple of weeks, but it turns out I got nothing. So here’s a summary.

New nephew! Welcome to Earth, Corey Michael.

Work kind of sucks. Counting on other people doesn’t work when they’re slacking fuckups. And getting a lengthy lecture from the Usual Suspect is enough to sour my cornflakes for days. At least I have an office door I can close when it all weighs on me a little too heavily. And, of course, there are good points such that I shouldn’t stalk out the door with no plan for the future. But still, right now it’s generally bleah.

Tennis is better. Despite my automatic feeling of disappointment for getting demoted down a skill level, the last three matches have been a lot more enjoyable than the first three. And not just because we won two of them. (Although: hooray!) When I play people who are a little more laid-back, it’s a lot easier to temper my naturally psychotic competitiveness. Having said that, I do have a bit of advice for people who play in social leagues: please, please, keep the score carefully. Giving yourself a boost by announcing it’s 15-15 when it should be 0-30 makes you look like a tool. (I’m glad we ended up beating them anyway, despite losing more than one game due to the crappy scorekeeping.)

Cycling is an obsession. But you dear readers already knew that. Last Saturday we rode 35 miles, the second longest ride ever. And it felt great. Just signed up for this year’s Hub on Wheels, too. This year the goal is 45 miles!

Hooray for Crowded House. Not only did they kick ass both nights I saw them in August, they had Kufala sell discs of the complete live shows. I’ll happily pay $20 to get a soundboard-quality recording, over a free one taped by the audience that sounds like shit on toast.

Live Nation/Clear Channel sucks. Thanks to their dickishness, CH shows performed at their venues have been pulled off Kufala and can’t be sold. Monopolistic jackasses. At least their bogus patent got busted. Still, there is work to be done to bring these bastards down.

Happy Birthday to MWL. Somehow I missed the first anniversary of this blog. I bet nobody else noticed, either. But how about that! Blogito, ergo sum.

The passing of the Rove

Thanks to the arrival of the Atlantic Monthly late last week, my disgust with the Bush administration has resurged to the point where it’s been hard to think of anything else. So my emotions are decidedly mixed with today’s top story of Karl Rove resigning from the White House staff. Of course, I immediately thought about the whole rat leaving sinking ship metaphor, and the whole door hitting him in the ass thing (I sincerely hope it does), but that all seems inadequate when confronted with the legacy of someone as despicable as Rove. This timely article does a good job providing an outline of what exactly Rove did to succeed so well at campaign politics, and how he was such a spectacular fuckup at helping run a functional government.

But what’s missing from that piece is the outrage, the deep personal sense of fury I feel at what has been done to my government and my country for the last seven years. By treating every minute of every day as part of a political campaign, Rove managed to strip all vestiges of competence out of the government. Spurred by his scorched-earth attitude and monomania of securing a permanent Republican majority, the executive branch abrogated its responsibility to govern. Instead of competent people, we got political hacks put in charge of things like FEMA and managing post-Saddam Iraq. And not surprisingly, they blindly and stupidly steered the bus into the ditch. People have fucking died because of these idiots: victims of Katrina, soldiers, American civilians, and a staggering number of Iraqi civilians in Iraq. Am I a godless liberal brainwashee to notice that? Meanwhile, Rove didn’t even want Bush to land the plane from which he surveyed the Katrina damage, and we are forever stuck with the image of President Chimpface standing under a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.”

Along with the competence, we also lost any shred of civility in political life. Considering how tenuous Bush’s claim to the presidency has been (and I’m being charitable there, please recognize) in both elections, it didn’t seem like too much to hope for that he really would try to be a uniter rather than a divider. But instead Bush managed to alienate even his own party in Congress, not to mention those of us who never cast a vote for him but still live under his management. And the mainstream media has been cowed to the point where they publish unvarnished partisan propaganda without question or analysis lest someone scream about their “liberal bias” or they lose access to the spin-controlled crumbs the administration throws them. Believe me, it’s hard to take the prez seriously when he seems more interested in whether foreign aid might lead to someone buying a condom than whether his casus belli for Iraq was actually legitimate.

So Rove is finally resigning. Well, the cynic in me can ruefully say, he’s certainly done enough damage such that he deserves a nice break. And I get no joy out of the resignation, considering how many years it’s going to take before all the mistakes of the Bush administration are rectified—assuming that someone still remembers how to actually run the government in this country. It’s definitely not going to be easy to explain to the next generation how we let this happen.

Arrrgh

Small frustrations all, but they add up.

• Nasty head cold for the last four days


• Arenas and Butler out for the season


• Elvis Costello tickets weirdly out of reach because eeeevil Ticketma$ter wants me to pay with a Visa


• Ridiculous $8 “convenience charge” per ticket should I ever be able to actually buy the damn tickets


• Cut my vacation short to try to make a deadline that I ended up not making, and that it turned out I didn’t even need to try to make in the first place!

Arrrrrrrgh!

Home is anywhere you hang your clogs

In the midst of the chaotic and angst-filled move at work (D-Day is coming up fast, Feb. 23!) it now becomes apparent that the once-hypothetical plan to find a pad with more space is coalescing into reality. The main reason for wanting to buy a new place? Well, there’s the rational, and the emotional. Rational is that it would be very nice to have a third bedroom, for hosting all our nonexistent guests that come to visit, or perhaps for stashing all the guitars and the keyboard and amps and other music-related stuff. Rational is that it would be very, very nice to have more than one bathroom. Rational is that now that prices are sliding, why not upgrade into Swankitude, Mark II. And that’s all good in theory, but it’s the emotional that has me practically running out the door of the place I’ve been happily living in for the last 2.5 years: the upstairs neighbors.

I can even narrow it down further: the female upstairs neighbor. Sure, she seems like a person of normal weight and height, and in possession of the normal amount of empathy toward fellow humans, but in reality she stomps around like a drunken overweight moose at a clog dance. And it’s back and forth, back and forth, all the damn time, starting at a ridiculously early time of day.

(I’ve been doing my best not to mention the 1-year-old toddler, by the way, who is far too young to do anything but the Frankenstein Walk and certainly can’t be blamed for crashing to the floor and/or dropping things at unpredictable moments. Not that it ain’t annoying.)

I can blame the unparalleled ruckus directly on Ms. Clog-Dancing Moose (CDM) quite easily, because last summer she was gone for three months and it was absolute bliss. Mr. Moose, despite being not a small guy, walked around more like Felt-Slipper-Wearing Mouse—and I would also like to point out that he is eminently considerate in general, always apologizing after flooding the shared basement or flooding our bathroom or flooding the basement a second time. Meanwhile, the swami went up there last week to beg for a minor concession, that the clog dancing be moved to a room other than the one above our bedroom in the early mornings, and found out that CDM is not only heavy-footed, but also bereft of all empathy and conscience.

So we’re starting to look at the listings and got in touch with the Realtor (tm) that helped us buy last time. It looks like there is a lot of good stuff out there, and hopefully it’s not the usual hyperbole of exuberant and semi-unscrupulous selling agents making shit up. I’ll try to provide updates as things happen, and hopefully will have some good horror stories regarding other people’s decorating ideas (though it will be hard to top the Cheetah Wallpaper Bathroom of 2001).

Wish me luck, fair readers, for this way lies madness!

Time won’t give me time

When am I going to grow a spine and cancel my subscription to Time magazine? My major complaint is that over the years they’ve been subtly and gradually changing the tone to one that is less like reporting and more like advertising. I even got torqued up enough last September to send an email accusing one writer of being a shill for a business whose product he reviewed. In the offending “article,” which I don’t feel like identifying because it will just name the damn product another time, was about a new cell phone. After gushing about the phone itself, quoting the manufacturer’s own description of the phone, the writer actually advised buying it now rather than waiting for other providers to offer it because one “may never again find a monthly rate this good.” In this era of uber-crass commercialization, does this kind of plug bother only me? For what it’s worth, I did get a reply to my email, but it was not in any way apologetic and rather defended how cool he thought the phone was. So be warned: Time magazine now carries bought-and-paid-for ads, as well as masquerading-as-articles ads.

The latest misstep is, of course, the now infamous “Person of the Year” issue where it was Us, the DIY You-Tubers who lurve to use teh Internets as our new medium of navel-gazing. Far be it from me to ignore the irony of bitching about it on my blog (and of course I’m also a couple of weeks late and the Eye of the People has certainly moved on by now). But come on. Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-Il, maybe someone involved in that Iraq thing going on, hell, even Vladimir Putin and his growing fondness for trying to bully the world through manipulation of the energy supply. I mean, do I matter even a tiny bit in the grand scheme of things in contrast to the aforementioned dudes? Sure, I love YouTube, sure I dig keeping up with the peeps blog-style. But it ain’t the most important shit that happened last year. Get some perspective, hmm?

So why do I continue to subscribe to this damn mag? Well, there’s certainly inertia at work. And they do a decent job in the front third of the mag to give me the lowdown on the week’s happenings. Hey, maybe I should just cancel until the 2008 presidential campaign starts to heat up. Uh—wait a second...

I Hate Christmas, Part 2

Well, the annual holiday fiasco is finally over and I’m safely back in the Snorklewacker Cave. Actually, the fiasco rating was quite low this year; much lower than it’s been in the past. One major reason for the relatively low level of stress was that we flew down to the family homesteads instead of driving—no 10 hours of slogging down the East Coast Megalopolis through holiday traffic. Just a couple hours of JetBlue entertaining me with XM radio. Why have we not been flying every year?? Also, the family strife and drama was at a minimum this year for some reason. Overall I managed to see three siblings, three nephews, the new(ish) niece, three siblings-in-law, one parent, one step-parent, two in-laws, and four friends over six days. Whew.
As for gifts, I simply must call out these two hideous apple figurine things for special mockery. Aren’t they awful? Egads. Anybody who wants ’em, they are yours, yours, yours. I ship internationally.

I Hate Christmas, Part 1

I need to buy a generic gift for the office Yankee swap on Thursday. At the moment I’m nearly homicidally irritated with half of my co-workers, and therefore not interested in giving any of them a gift, and friendly enough with the other half to know that they are dreading the swap just as much as I am. Blah, what to buy? At this point I think the default is food, although that just screams uninspired. Last year somebody tried the ultimate tacky move and unwrapped his own present. (Although he didn’t count on me taking it from him, heheh!) Hmph, I’m not feeling the holiday cheer over here. Christmas is such a pain in the ass. Well, except for the proliferation of chocolate. But I refuse to look for an upside while I’m in this cranky mood.

Hieronymus Bosch in a down parka

It’s been cold outside today. Cold in an empty-void-of-outer-space kind of way. I was out there wrapped in my warmest coat, two hats, hands inside gloves inside pockets and I could tell you exactly which square inches of my body were not covered in enough layers. (Ankles, bridge of the nose, toes.) And it’s times like that when you begin to grasp the speck-like insignificance of humanity, that the very air around you is not your friend as it tries to suck the life out of your body and the heat out of your skin. It makes me glad that medieval artists didn’t know about physics, because if they had, the center of the most ghoulish painting or carving depicting the horrific depths of hell would not have Satan at the center, but Thermodynamics, represented by a blank-eyed quadruple-fanged serpent with an empty belly drinking the warm life-force right out of its innocent victims, diamond-studded eyes staring with the cruel impersonality of a relentless, mindless force. (Or maybe I shouldn’t have watched any of Queen of the Damned on basic cable last night, a truly awful movie by one of the more awful writers of paperbacks I loved when I was a teenager, because it’s making me feel Gothic and tragic and positively overwrought. Moreover, to expand this parenthetical aside past the point of reason, Van Helsing was on basic cable tonight and I can confirm that it really sucks. I mean, you can’t even watch it for more than a few minutes at a time because the pain in your head intensifies with every second. Normally good actors acting very badly, bad actors acting badly, special effects that look completely cheesy, David Wenham’s appallingly terrible haircut, etc. Yeesh.)

Now I’ve lost my train of thought. Anyway, it was damn cold today and I’m someone who likes it cold. At the same time, for the next several days I’ll be the only person in this big house and that’s exacerbating this cold feeling. I’ve been blasting the TV and the music, and that helps. The next step is tossing this tiny stone into the giant ocean of cyberspace and causing a couple of ripples to remind the world that I’m over here generating heat, using electricity, and just generally being alive. Hey, remind me not to play “Log Cabin Fever” by Split Enz this week, okay? At least, not until Swami gets back from his trip to China.

Drop the thesaurus, pal

That word doesn’t mean what they think it means.

Blogger says: no birthday for you!

My post wishing Sashe a happy birthday, posted on the exact day and everything, has just disappeared. I have just spent the last half hour saving all my damn posts, in case the whole thing goes up in smoke someday. Fellow bloggers, if you have any interest in posterity, I guess this proves you don’t leave it up to Blogspot.

Wheels on fire

The old Civic has had two incidents of running hot in the last four months, both of which seemed to be fixed by throwing money at it. But it did it again today. It already has a new radiator and a new thermostat—unfortunately the next thing to consider is damn expensive (head gasket). Maybe it’s time to buy a new car this weekend. Ten years and 164,000 miles is a good run for a car, isn’t it? But... I am so not in the mood to deal with car-buying schmack. And the new Civics are so damn ugly.

Paging Stevie Wonder

I wish I had another person on my staff so I didn’t have to do the work of two people.
I wish Al Gore had been inaugurated in January 2001.
I wish JetBlue flew to WAS and not just IAD.
I wish the zipper on my briefcase wasn’t broken.
I wish the workweek was only four days long.
I wish all of my peeps still lived in the area.
I wish difficult decisions were more easily made.
I wish the people who live above me would stop stomping everywhere they walk (how do they not have shin splints by now??).
I wish X3 hadn’t sucked so much.
I wish people did what was asked of them occasionally, and not just what they felt like doing.
I wish politics in this country weren’t so mean-spirited and partisan.
I wish I had more time to be creative.
I wish I had a more cheerful blog entry to foist upon my dear readers!

This week in WTF-land

Okay cats and kittens, here’s the latest list of things that are irking my jive.

Location, location—what was the third thing again?
My place of employment is engaged in a half-hearted (and half-witted) attempt to relocate from the place it’s been for the entire 33 years of its existence. The current prospects are: 1) a lovely, spacious, modern building in the heart of the Square that’s close to all kinds of stuff and actually has room for everyone on staff; or 2) a cockeyed, ramshackle dog of a building that is about 40% of our current size and perhaps 20% as charming—if you keep one eye closed and a bottle of vodka handy. But the hard fact here is that option 1 isn’t even a true prospect, because there’s no money to pay the lease that would come with it. I wish I’d never seen it in the first place, just to have my hopes raised and then summarily squashed flatter than hammered shit. And to the university whose name we bear, I ask: Where is the love, comrades? How about offering us a space that’s larger than Khrushchev’s shoe?

PeopleSoft and Safari: Can’t we all just get along?
So I’ve never been able to access PeopleSoft with Safari, for no damn good reason. Now I get a memo stating that as of next week, PeopleSoft will no longer work with Internet Explorer. They claim it’ll work with Safari, but then they reveal that it’ll work only with Safari 2.0. Which I don’t have. Which I’d have to buy Tiger to get. Can someone remind these chuckleheads that the whole point of web-based interfaces is a little concept called interoperability? Platform-freaking-independence? Land of the free and home of Steve Jobs? Ah, never mind, I didn’t want to view my paycheck anyway.

Expletives available upon request
It’s been almost a year since I left my last post and moved “up” to manager, and my former position is still vacant. One year doing the work of two people. At this point I’m tempted to tie the Chicago Manual of Style around my ankles and jump into the Charles. And why, why are there no scholars/authors who know how to properly construct a bibliography? I know, it’s esoteric knowledge, but at least pretend you care. Maybe spell “USSR,” or Stalin’s first name, correctly once in a while.

Girls, girls, girls

My thoughts are pretty chaotic right now, which is making it hard to write a pithy blog post. But I want to share some of the things that have been kicking around the last couple of days, and they do all seem to hit on a common theme.

1) At work right now they’re in the middle of interviews to fill a vacancy. After the hiring committee meets with the candidates, the rest of us staff have been meeting with the prospectives in a less formal, less interview-like session. Yesterday it hit me: the hiring committee is all men, and the staff at the get-to-know-you meeting are all women. It’s bad enough that I’m the first female in the 33-year history of the place to sit on the Editorial Board, and these job candidates are getting the same message on their first visit: men in power, women in supporting roles. Depressing.

2) The sudden upsurge in new babies (my new niece, Frantix’s recent arrival) and the “On Balance” blog at the Washington Post have me thinking about breastfeeding. (I’m not linking to “On Balance”, by the way, because I think it’s actually very lame; you can track it down yourself if you’re really interested.) I am truly appalled sometimes at the virulent militancy of pro-breastfeeding people. Let women make their own damn choices, all right? Formula isn’t paint thinner, for pity’s sake. And making specious arguments about cow’s milk not being meant for people, or implying that women who feed formula aren’t good mothers because they’re not sacrificing enough of themselves, is the exact kind of irrational nonsense that traps women in the same old stereotypes. Stop with the crazy talk and give me something reasonable we can discuss.

3) Along the same lines, the recent debates about working mothers (just Google “Linda Hirschman”) never ceases to amaze me. Reading anything written by Caitlin Flanagan or Sandra Tsing-Loh in the Atlantic makes me want to tear my hair out, they’re so righteous and so fond of ad hominem. Has anyone else ever noticed that this debate in particular seems to demand that every participant hold up her own life for scrutiny? Do we ask politicians to have opinions only on matters with personal relevance? (On the other side of that coin, it never fails to irritate me when a politician takes up a cause only after being affected by it personally. To quote Meadow Soprano, “Self-involved much?”) Is it so implausible to think that we could discuss the truly difficult issue of balancing work and the rest of one’s life in a rational and less personal manner? Besides, I wonder whether the working-mother question is more of an economic issue than a social one. Health care in the U.S. is almost entirely dependent on full-time employment, which means that in a domestic partnership you need to have at least one person working those 40 hours per week. If we could sever health care from employment, you could have each partner working 50%, or 75%, and strike a balance between work and family that fits your needs exactly. Never mind that revamping health care in the U.S. is probably harder than colonizing Jupiter.

The only thing I can conclude from all this is that I’m in dire need of a vacation. Fortunately, I have one coming up next week. Pundit fatigue is setting in...

Current doses of WTF

As I ease back into the grinding despair of the workweek, here are a few things that have me shaking my head.

• This newsflash from Ars.Technica: the RIAA are still peabrained, despicable weasels


• Recently overheard from a coworker: it is being overly attached to your possessions and loved ones that causes cancer. Silly me, I thought it was caused by damage to DNA, triggered by genetic or environmental factors.


• Maurice Clarett. Seriously, dude, WTF. See especially the most recent developments. If you feel like signing up to read the Washington Post, Michael Wilbon wrote a good piece on this trainwreck of a guy. (Note that one of the sidebars contains the misspelling "Columbis"—whoops.)