Tuh-weet

I love my blog. Sometimes too much. I don’t like to sit down and slap together posts in a hurry, but in the last several months, I’ve had too many other things to do to spend time writing the posts I want. So you get a bunch of down time. Looks like it’ll be spring before I have much blogging time again, so, in the meantime, I’m tweeting. All the little thoughts that would’ve been long-winded blog posts will now be crammed into 140 characters.

Follow me, if you’d like; should be fun.

@justindburton (don’t forget the middle initial!)

Horrenous Predictions: NFL ‘09

Looks like the NFC’s finally catching up…

AFC
East
1. New England Patriots 12-4
2. Miami Dolphins 8-8
3. New York Jets 6-10
4. Buffalo Bills 6-10

The Jets and Dolphins may have bright futures, but I think it’s an all-around struggle for them this year.

North
1. Pittsburgh Steelers 11-5
2. Cincinnati Bengals 9-7
3. Baltimore Ravens 8-8
4. Cleveland Browns 5-11

Flacco may be good, but who’s he throwing to? I think defenses can mostly stack the line and dare someone to make catches. The Bengals bob to the surface this year, I think.

South
1. Indianapolis Colts 11-5
2. Houston Texans 10-6*
3. Jacksonville Jaguars 9-7*
4. Tennessee Titans 8-8

A really solid conference. Indianapolis will eventually fall off, one assumes, but I’m not willing to call it til I see it. I think Tennessee comes back to earth and Houston finally cashes in on their promise.

West
1. San Diego Chargers 13-3
2. Kansas City Chiefs 8-8
3. Denver Broncos 5-11
4. Oakland Raiders 3-13

Watch Rivers put up ridiculous stats against a soft schedule. Oakland may need to just take a couple of years off to collect its thoughts.

NFC
East
1. New York Giants 11-5
2. Philadelphia Eagles 10-6
3. Dallas Cowboys 8-8
4. Washington 7-9

But, really, this could be shuffled up in any order, probably.

North
1. Green Bay Packers 12-4
2. Chicago Bears 11-5
3. Minnesota Vikings 8-8
4. Detroit Lions 3-13

Two Super Bowl contenders here, plus a team that F***e will drag down to mediocrity.

South
1. New Orleans Saints 10-6
2. Carolina Panthers 9-7
3. Atlanta Falcons 8-8
4. Tampa Bay Buccaneers 7-9

In a mediocre division, give me the best quarterback.

West
1. Seattle Seahawks 11-5
2. St. Louis Rams 9-7
3. Arizona Cardinals 6-10
4. San Francisco 49ers 4-12

After an historically injury-addled year, I think the Seahawks have one run left in them.

AFC Championship: San Diego over Pittsburgh
NFC Championship: Chicago over Philadelphia
Super Bowl: San Diego over Chicago

Horrendous Predictions: College Football ‘09

I’m increasingly mystified by college sports. I’m not sure what’s happening to me, but I find them less interesting and, consequently, I have a harder time coming up with anything like an informed opinion.

Good thing this space isn’t for informed opinions…

Big East: Rutgers
ACC: Florida State
SEC: Florida
Big 12: Texas
Big 10: Penn State
Pac 10: USC

Remaining BCS Bowl Teams: Boise State, Oklahoma (so they can get rolled again), LSU, Virginia Tech

BCS Championship Game: USC over Florida

Let’s see how many of these are wrong before the weekend’s over…

Bonus Section!

Who doesn’t love international soccer, right?

Ahem, right?

English Premier League: Chelsea
Spanish La Liga: Barcelona
Italian Serie A: Juventus (unfortunately)
Champions League: Real Madrid

SYTYCD Finale Power Rankings

1. Brandon
2. Kayla
3. Jeanine
4. Ade

-Who’s voting for Evan? Are there that many Broadway lovers out there? Or is this further proof that teenage girls shouldn’t be allowed to text? …Although his success makes me wish I could go back in time to high school to see if that “Aw shucks” face is really so effective.
-The case against Evan requires nothing more than looking at Melissa’s face when she drew his name from the hat this week. I feel comfortable predicting that next week’s weakest routines will involve him.
-A rarity for a Nigel Lithgoe production: Cat was hurrying the judges through their earliest comments, then Lil C had to extemporize for an extra minute toward the end to cover for time. However pervy Nigel is, his shows usually run like clockwork (witness the timing debacles of AI this season to see how much they miss him). Not sure what happened here.
-That “Send in the Clowns” number was hauntingly bananas. Oh no, I’ve liked multiple Tyce D’Orio routines this year. Is there something OTC I can take for that?

-For the hundredth episode, old contestants came back to perform, and in this week’s performance show, Nigel listed off several great dancers from previous seasons. In both cases, Sabra and Danny were conspicuously absent. What gives?
-Kayla and Brandon partnering for contemporary was almost unfair.

-You know how Michael Phelps is a great swimmer, but he’s spent so much time becoming a great swimmer that he doesn’t really seem to know anything about anything that’s not swimming? It’s great for the Olympics, but it probably means a dinner conversation with him would be pretty…unimpressive. Sometimes I think Michael Phelps and Kayla are similar.
-During the Top 8 performance show, Nigel mentioned that he had been disappointed with the hip hop routines this year. That’s on him. NappyTab do some interesting things, and I think they’ve been just as solid this year as they were last year. But they’re so stylized that they can’t be asked to pull all of the hip hop weight for a season. Find another dependable hip hop choreographer or two, continue to use Dave Scott and Shane Sparks every now and then, and let NappyTab shine as part of an ensemble.
-Speaking of ensembles:

-Oh, and did you realize that people remix performances? It looks ridiculously time-consuming.

Forgiveness Is More Than Saying Sorry

There’s a resolution in the House that, if passed, would demand that Obama formally apologize to Sergeant Crowley for his remarks following the ridiculous arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

No need to lose one’s mind over this; it’s a resolution being proposed by someone who wants to make a name for himself while also making Obama look ridiculous. That’s how these things work.

I do wonder, though, whether this has been done before? Has Congress demanded an apology from a president in the past, and, if so, what for? This is a serious question; please post below if you know anything.

My guess is that either a Congressional demand for apology is reserved for the most severe transgressions (which would tell us how screwy Thaddeus McCotter’s (R-Mich) priorities are) or else is seen as a bush league move. Without knowing the history of this sort of thing, I don’t know which it is.

The Greatest Player Who Never Lived

No contest: Bo Jackson from NES’s Tecmo Super Bowl.

To Wit

So that whole “fair treatment of McNulty” that I mentioned as an ideal scenario in my last post? Not so much happening.

There’s Mark Cuban, at his blog, praising ESPN for not reporting the story from the start and comparing McNulty to a streaker at a sporting event:

In this decade of digital media and internet everywhere, you dont have to run out on the field to get noticed.  You just sue someone or you accuse someone of doing something.

It doesn’t matter if its true.  Just put out a press release announcing the suit. This is America. You can sue anyone for anything. Maybe you have to pay for the lawyer. Maybe the lawyer does it on retainer or for the PR value. The bigger the Celeb. The more the PR. The more famous you are. Celebs should be used to this stuff.  Its just the price of fame, right ?

Then there’s this gem from SI’s Monday Morning Quarterback, Peter King:

I don’t know the truth. I don’t know if Roethlisberger knows Andrea McNulty or not. None of us do. But if I were Big Ben, I’d be sleeping pretty easy. How does McNulty, the woman making the charges, not go to the police, wait a day before telling a superior anything, not seek medical attention, never file a criminal complaint, then wait a year before filing a civil suit? How are we not supposed to think this is a money-grab?

So, lemme get this straight, Peter. You don’t know what happened, but you feel very comfortable asking some very unbalanced rhetorical questions in order to discredit McNulty in the most widely read weekly football column in the country? Classy.

I would enjoy seeing any other mismanagements of this story that you’d like to post in the comments.

Roethlisberger

Last week, Ben Roethlisberger was accused of raping Andrea McNulty, who claims it happened about a year ago in Lake Tahoe. Roethlisberger, of course, denies the accusation, and McNulty, for her part, has filed a civil suit, not a criminal one. This last point is crucial because ESPN has barely reported this story, and they claim it’s because of a policy that prevents them from reporting on civil suits, though the consistency with which the policy has been applied is questionable, and one has a hard time imagining that if Donovan McNabb had been the accused in this instance, ESPN would have (non)reported the story in the same way.

A couple of general rules seem undeniable:

1. Athletes are rich and involved in an inordinate amount of sexual canoodling. This means that it is absolutely possible that an athlete is vulnerable to false accusations of sexual misconduct.

2. Many women who are sexually assaulted do not report the incident. Reasons can range from fear to intimidation to embarrassment…the list could go on forever. In the case of McNulty, the fact that she’s filing a civil (not criminal) suit a year after the fact does not in itself undermine her claim. Her employer did not support her, and she says she suffered psychologically from the incident, which could very well prevent her from managing to publicly accuse Roethlisberger until now. Moreover, he’s the one with the microphone and the legion of fans, not her. Without a rock solid case, she will most likely have her private life exposed for little more than to become a hated footnote among many of Roethlisberger’s fans.

Given these two facts, it seems impossible that anyone besides Roethlisberger and McNulty know what happened. Ideally, reporters’ primary concern will be the fair treatment of McNulty. Because athletes have access to media, money, and good lawyers, they have the upper hand in all of these cases. If McNulty is ridiculed, then future victims of sexual assault by professional athletes will surely choose to remain silent instead of speaking up.

***

Finally, a mildly esoteric note on fandom. I learned many years ago not to fool myself into assuming the athletes on my favorite team are quality people. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a post following the death of Michael Jackson, related this idea quite elegantly.

Ray Lewis may well be an accessory to a man’s murder. But when I watch him run up and down field on Sunday, it sparks something in me. Woody Allen wooed his wife’s adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester. But I think Bananas makes me laugh. Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist. But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick. And so on…I guess I could peel these people out my life. I guess I could stop seperating art from men. Regrettably, I think, I wouldn’t be left with much art worth admiring. Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things. One doesn’t cancel the other. And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.

Being a fan of a sport or an art is a truly bizarre experience. We enjoy the creative output – that which we often think of as the representation of a person’s true self – of many people we would almost certainly find deplorable. In one sense, it’s blind rationalization: I’ve always cheered for the Steelers, so I’m not going to stop now, but I must find some way to explain why I can delight in the athletic exploits of a guy who may very well have raped a woman last year in Tahoe. In another sense, as TNC hints at, what art is left if we stop enjoying the creative output of profligates?

And instead of lying to ourselves and choosing to forget the uglier events, I think it’s more instructive to sit with the messy paradox. My guess is that in fully facing the horrors and wonders of our favorite artists and athletes, we come to some better understanding of ourselves. Not just as individuals, but as a collective that must depend on truly terrible people at crucial moments.

Dads

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but a recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution crystallized a few ideas for me. It’s about a White dad who always does his Ethiopian daughter’s hair.

The story itself is heartwarming enough, and Clifton Green seems like a nice guy. My problem isn’t so much with him or the family, but with the fact that this is a story deemed worthy of a newspaper feature. The draw of the story is, of course, that this is a White(!) man(!) doing his Black(!) daughter’s(!) hair. It’s against the norm, so it’s interesting.

My question is, where are the stories about White and Black women who do their daughters’ hair every day? Green is singled out because we believe he’s doing something beyond his job description as father. His wife even indicates as much when she describes his braiding as a “gift” to their daughter. Do we think of women who do their kids’ hair as bestowing gifts on their children, or are they just doing what we think they should be doing?

Since I’ve been a parent, I’ve gotten lots of comments about how I change my son’s diapers or feed him or care for his hair or any other number of “domestic” deeds I perform. K doesn’t get very many, if any at all. No one’s surprised that she knows how to change a diaper. No one asks where she learned to comb hair. And I’ve lost count of the number of public men’s rooms I’ve been in that don’t have changing tables. It may not be a huge deal, but when we single out men for being good parents and ignore women for doing exactly the same thing (and, of course, sometimes more), then what are we telling ourselves about gendered work?

Media Alert: That’s My Doctor!

Well, not my doctor, but my son’s. Dr. Jane Aronson, in all of her spectacular glory, will be a guest on NPR’s Tell Me More. Here’s a snippet from the press release:

Dr. Jane Aronson, WWO Founder and CEO, will be a guest on NPR’s “Tell Me More,” a nationally-syndicated public radio newsmagazine program, for a wide-ranging discussion on the “Orphan” movie. The interview will explore the film’s harmful perpetuation of stereotypes of orphaned children, and the impact on adoption. Dr. Aronson issued a press statement after attending a special movie screening on July 24, prior to the opening.

The segment will also discuss Hollywood’s portrayal of orphans. Ann Hornaday, Washington Post movie critic, will join Dr. Aronson as a guest on the show. Hornaday recently wrote a review of the “Orphan” movie.

Here’s NPR’s website; you can check to see when your local affiliate will air the program. Or you can just podcast it after the fact.

Have I mentioned how fantastic she is? Seriously, think anything but a good thought about her and see how fast you get my stink eye.

But, no, seriously, discuss below. I’m interested to see what she says in a longer form interview, and I’m interested to see what my legions of readers think about what she says, as well.