On this week\’s podcast, we introduce the Grossinator, discuss the greatest guitar solos of all time, and review Milwaukee soul band Kings Go Forth\’s new album \”The Outsiders are Back.\”
Listen here:
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/willsband/Kings_Go_Forth.mp3]Or download directly here.
Other links referenced in the podcast:
Here\’s what is on George W. Bush\’s iPod, circa 2005.
Here\’s a YouTube demonstration of the Grossinator.
Here\’s a video for \”One Day\” by Kings Go Forth:
My latest column is up over at the WPRI website. It discusses what lessons the markets can learn from baseball card collectors. An excerpt:
I suppose it could be argued that everything I know about markets and economics came from baseball card collecting. At age 14, I had a massive collection, complete with card value spreadsheets and the like. My card trading negotiations with my friends likely resembled the Iranian hostage negotiations. They often dragged on for days, and involved insults, flattery, and every other negotiating tactic one can invoke. Thank God I hadn\’t heard of waterboarding.
I bought Mike Greenwell rookie cards in the way Warren Buffett snatches up undervalued stocks. I tucked them all away, waiting for them to appreciate in value, as they almost certainly had to. When I finally took a class in college on investing in stocks, I just said “ooooh, it’s just like baseball cards.” Only a little less cutthroat.
Read it here.
1987 was a big year for the Cincinnati Reds’ athletic young star Eric Davis. The graceful, lithe outfielder was coming off a breakout season in which he hit 27 home runs and stole 80 bases. He was a combination of power and speed the league hadn’t seen in some time (and wouldn’t see for at least one more year, when a skinny rookie named Barry Bonds would make his debut.) In their 1987 season preview, Sports Illustrated called Davis “the Michael Jordan of baseball.”
It just so happened that Eric Davis’ emergence coincided with the explosion of the baseball card industry in the late 1980s. Baseball cards had been around in some form for over a century; but a variety of factors (most notably the loosening of the Topps card company’s monopoly on card production) propelled baseball card trading into a lucrative investment opportunity for kids and adults alike. By 1987, a Don Mattingly rookie card, issued only three years earlier, could fetch $90. After his historic 49 home run rookie season, Mark McGwire’s 1985 Topps Olympic rookie card shot up to 30 bucks apiece.
This is why, in 1987, I went to a baseball card show and shelled out $13 for a 1985 Topps Eric Davis rookie card. I checked the card’s value religiously from month to month. The value continued to climb as Davis hit 37 home runs and drove in 100 runs in 1987 – MVP-type numbers in the pre-steroid era. I felt I was sitting on a gold mine. I was already planning what type of Porsche I would buy on my 30th birthday and Davis was on his way to the Hall of Fame.
Full of pride at my purchase, I sought out my Dad, in order to brag. I told him I had a card that was worth twenty bucks. It was then he said something that would remain with me for the rest of my life:
“It’s only a piece of cardboard until someone’s willing to pay you 20 bucks for it.”
And there you have it – market economics summed up in one sentence. You can spend a lifetime reading Friedman, Hayek, or Von Mises; but if you want to save yourself days off your life, just heed my Dad’s advice. Nothing has an economic value beyond what someone is willing to pay for it. “Value” is simply an implicit contract between the buyer and seller. The same holds true for employment – nobody is really “underpaid.” You either work for what your boss is willing to pay you, or you don’t. That’s your “value.”
(Comedian George Carlin summed this up nicely when he observed that most people “do just enough work so they don’t get fired, and get paid just enough so they don’t quit.”)
I suppose it could be argued that everything I know about markets and economics came from baseball card collecting. At age 14, I had a massive collection, complete with card value spreadsheets and the like. My card trading negotiations with my friends likely resembled the Iranian hostage negotiations. They often dragged on for days, and involved insults, flattery, and every other negotiating tactic one can invoke. Thank God I hadn’t heard of waterboarding.
I bought Mike Greenwell rookie cards in the way Warren Buffett snatches up undervalued stocks. I tucked them all away, waiting for them to appreciate in value, as they almost certainly had to. When I finally took a class in college on investing in stocks, I just said “ooooh, it’s just like baseball cards.” Only a little less cutthroat.
In the late 1980s, major newspapers noticed the link between stocks and baseball cards. As documented in Dave Jamieson’s excellent book Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, newspapers ran stories like “Turning Cardboard into Cash: These are Boom Days for Baseball Cards (The Washington Post), “A Grand Slam Profit May Be in the Cards” (The New York Times), and “Cards Put Gold, Stocks to Shame as Investment” (The Orange County Register).
Unfortunately, as happens in the stock market, baseball cards in the 1980s were riding a wave of irrational exuberance. The values were inflated well beyond a level that could be sustained – by 1991, an industry researcher estimated that $1.4 billion was spent on wholesale sports cards for the year ending in June.
But soon, it all came crashing down. The number of new card companies that flooded the market severely depressed the value of existing cards. The cost of card packs soared from around fifty cents per pack to over four dollars a pack in many cases, leaving young boys in the cold. Plus, as Jamieson notes, the 1994 Major League Baseball strike left a lot of uncertainty in the card market, and a lot of animosity towards baseball in general.
As unthinkable as it was just five years before, baseball card dealers couldn’t move any of their product. Card stores went out of business en masse – they are exceedingly difficult to find to this day, and when they exist, they deal primarily in memorabilia. Stock in the Topps company quickly dropped from its high of over $20 per share in 1992 to $4.25 in 1996.
As it turns out, the cards were just cardboard – when the desire of purchasers to pay $50 for a 1987 Fleer Barry Bonds rookie card (which I own) disappeared, the industry came crashing down, leaving many investors broke. (Current listed value of the Bonds card: $12.00)
This is not at all unlike the crashes suffered by the U.S. stock market in 2001 when the tech bubble burst, or in 2008 when the U.S. housing market deflated. In each instance, a crippling downturn was preceded by the same kind of irrational short-term thinking. Greed and myopic thinking caused investors to be overextended and caused them to expose themselves to an inordinate amount of risk. If only Wall Street bankers had collected baseball cards as children – they’d have learned their lessons.
A quick eBay check shows me that my Eric Davis card is selling these days for a cool $2.00. But the lesson Eric Davis taught me in investing is worth at least an extra fifty cents. Maybe one of these days, Congress will get around to having a hearing.
So go ahead, make an offer.
Visitors to the Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers last Friday thought they were watching oral arguments in an action taken against Justice Mike Gableman by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission. In fact, they were watching something very different.
At issue was a television advertisement run by Gableman’s campaign in 2008 that criticized then-Justice Louis Butler for being soft on crime. The ad dealt with Butler’s time as child molester Reuben Lee Mitchell’s defense attorney, accusing Butler of freeing his client so he could then go on to molest another child. In fact, Mitchell served out his entire term and only molested another child after his initial term was over.
For an hour on Friday, justices debated whether Gableman violated the Wisconsin judicial code with his ad by making what they believed to be a “false” statement. For most of the proceedings, attorneys representing both the Judicial Commission and Gableman parsed whether the true statements made by Gableman in the ad, when put together sequentially, rose to the level of being “misleading.” Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson waited a full 110 seconds before interrupting WJC executive director James C. Alexander’s opening statement – from then, she essentially made all of Alexander’s arguments for him. (By the end of his testimony, all Alexander could say was “yes” when Abrahamson asked him if he agreed with her.)
Of course, such consternation over campaign ads is rare in politics. There is actually a Wisconsin Statute that criminalizes false statements in campaign advertisements – and while enforcement is often threatened, it is virtually never actually used. (However, Gableman is charged with violating judicial code, not statutes.) If the state law against campaign misrepresentations was actually enforced, most of the Legislature would be behind bars (instead of just Jeff Wood.)
All one has to do is quickly peruse the Wispolitics Adwatch website to pick out some preposterous television ad claims. For instance, in 2008, the Democratic National Committee actually ran an advertisement saying Congressman Paul Ryan wanted to “end Medicare.” Yet it appears no members of the DNC ended up being dragged before a court to explain themselves. (Nor should they be.) In 2009, a group supporting Abrahamson herself ran an advertisement saying her opponent at the time, Judge Randy Koschnick “sides against victims.” Yet no one recalls Abrahamson rushing to the Judicial Commission to condemn the crass electioneering from which she herself benefited.
This just shows that the charges against Gableman aren’t really about Gableman at all. They are merely about nullifying the results of an election that Abrahamson and the other liberal justices think they should have won. The true irony is, that by decrying Gableman’s attempt to criticize Butler’s liberal use of loopholes, the left wingers on the Court are trying to open up a loophole that defense attorneys can drive the Capitol building through. Defense attorneys are now trying to file motions to have Gableman recuse himself from criminal trials based on his television ad – a move that would leave the Court deadlocked 3-3 on many controversial criminal rights matters. So while the public voted for a justice they believed would uphold the criminal law, Abrahamson has figured a way to overturn the will of the people by silencing Gableman’s vote.
Furthermore, if Abrahamson’s actions against Gableman are successful, future candidates will live in fear of the Judicial Commission, and what the WJC will allow them to say in campaign commercials. It’s no secret that Abrahamson has a stranglehold on the WJC – she appoints four of the commission’s nine members – so it may be up to Abrahamson to decide in the future what conservative judicial candidates are allowed to say. (In the meantime, she will continue to be able to tell people in her ads that she’ll solve their housing problems, whether or not a case is brought before the Court.)
This case ceased being about Mike Gableman long ago – it is merely a crass attempt to inject politics into the branch of government that purports to be above the vulgarity of politics. The Court shouldn’t allow itself to be bullied, and dispense with this foolishness post-haste.
Let me go on record. The Tea Party movement is wonderful. It gets people involved in the political process who normally never would. It forces viewpoints into the public that are sometimes hard to find. And Tea Parties irritate just the right people. They are on their way to being the most important movement for conservatism (or libertarianism, in some cases) in the past twenty years.
I attended the Tea Party at the Wisconsin State Capitol last weekend, and filed this video report. It was a great event – as I documented, plenty of colorful people showed up. It was funny – many of my liberal friends e-mailed me to express shock that I was “hard” on the Tea Partiers, while my conservative friends universally liked the friendly jabs I took. (My goal is to one day have an obituary headline like H.L. Mencken’s: “Mencken, Critic of All, Dies.”) I figured these are my people – I can kid with them a little, right?
In any event, despite the steaming bowl of wonderfulness that Tea Parties bring to American political discourse, there are always ways to improve them. As I walked around and observed the festivities, I jotted down a few things I think could help build on the great event that the organizers put together this year:
1. RECALIBRATE THE LANGUAGE
I hate paying taxes. You hate paying taxes. But several of the speakers took this meme to the next level, saying taxpayers are being “raped” and that taxpayers have become “slaves.” And they said it over and over and over.
Let’s be clear: paying exorbitant taxes is not like being raped. And the government taking more of your income, as damaging to your wallet and the economy as it is, is not akin to slavery. (Nobody on a boat headed to America from Africa in the 1800s was saying “boy, I hope they don’t tax my capital gains.”)
There are plenty of reasons to be irate about paying high taxes in order to fund wasteful government spending. But a truly skilled speakers can relay that outrage without slipping into offensive hyperbole. Using words like “rape” and “slavery” only serve to marginalize the great movement that has been built to this point.
2. CANDIDATES AND ELECTED OFFICIALS – IN OR OUT?
In years past, it seems like a conscious effort has been made to keep elected officials and candidates from speaking at the Tea Party rallies. But every now and then, one will slip into the mix. This year, Ron Johnson, who is thinking about taking on U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, was given a platform to speak, while other candidates were left off the docket. (Johnson’s speech was really good, incidentally.) Last year, fiscal dreamboat Paul Ryan spoke to the crowd, but other elected officials fighting for conservatism at the state level weren’t allowed to speak.
It seems one of the themes of the Tea Parties is that they aren’t connected to specific candidates or political parties. Sure, they’ll get behind candidates with whom they agree (they are in the process of endorsing candidates all over the country), but many of their members have just as much animosity towards Republicans as they do Democrats. Tea Party organizers should make it more clear what the standard is for allowing current elected officials to speak – there are plenty of state officials that would be really good.
3. COUNTRY MUSIC
Not all conservatives like country music. Just stop it. It’s almost like the musical selection is being written by what Keith Olbermann thinks right wingers would want to hear.
4. THE CULT OF PERSONALITY
Much has been made of former Governor Tommy Thompson’s appearance at the Tea Party in Wisconsin last week, where he announced he would not be running against Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold. In some respects, Tommy injected free-market conservatism into areas of state government that badly needed it (school choice, welfare reform, etc.) But in other areas, Thompson represents exactly the type of politician that Tea Partiers despise. Even Thompson’s staunchest defenders wouldn’t necessarily consider him thrifty with taxpayers’ money.
But when Tommy wanted to speak at the Tea Party, the organizers were stuck with a quandary: Do we exclude the most popular politician in the state, even if he’s only there to serve his own purposes?
Thompson’s appearance weakened the message of the Tea Party – it told attendees that the event was more about personalities than ideas. Tommy’s announcement sucked media attention away from the people who had traveled to Madison from all over the state to be there, and focused it all on himself. And the fact that his speech led people to believe he was going to run, then pulled the rug out from under them, just discouraged the crowd.
In the future, organizers should reconsider if they’re going to allow their well-meaning event to be the host for individuals to latch on to serve their own purposes. It happened this year, and damaged the event.
5. EASY ON THE MEDIA
Nothing gets a crowd of conservatives riled up (and rightfully so) than speakers slamming the liberal media. And speaker after speaker did just that. It was ironic, however, that they did so while dozens of media cameras were right there at stage side, and while just as many nattily-attired reporters were roasting under the hot sun all day covering the event. We can rip them all we want when they pass on lefty talking points (and I will continue to do so), but on this day, they deserved credit for being there. Chastising the media when they’re right there in front of the stage covering you looks self-defeating. (Samuel Alito just mouthed the words, “I agree.”)
6. TAILGATING
Seriously – who’s ever heard of a Wisconsin event where thousands of people get together and there’s no tailgating? Someone figure out the grilling rules for the Capitol lawn and let’s fire up the bratwurst.
7. LAUGH A LITTLE
Last week, speaker after speaker strode to the stage, veins bulging, demanding we take our country back. (By the way, the new Tea Party Drinking Game involves taking a drink any time any speaker says “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” You’d be drunk in 15 minutes.)
It might be a nice change to have some speakers that can use a little humor to make their points. The stereotype of conservatives is that they are angry and humorless. While there’s plenty of reason to be angry, there’s also enough reason to laugh at what’s been going on in America. It disarms people and makes the speaker seem smarter than they probably are. Plus, it would be a nice change of pace from the apocalyptic rhetoric we get from the rest of the speaking lineup.
8. TELL US WHAT TO DO
While some of the speakers mentioned some specific issues (Apostle David King, for instance, denounced the “ding dongs” in the Legislature about to pass a bill making it easier to commit vote fraud), many of them discuss conservatism and limited government in the abstract. Many of them go on at length about the Founding Fathers (including an interminable speech by a guy dressed like Thomas Jefferson) and recite passages from the U.S. Constitution. (Rule of thumb in politics: 90% of people who start talking to you about the true meaning of the Constitution are lunatics.)
More emphasis should be given to what people can do RIGHT NOW. The Founding Fathers are great, but Ben Franklin isn’t crawling out of his crypt to stop the global warming bill in the Wisconsin State Legislature. The people in the crowd on the capitol lawn have to do that. Immediately.
It would be helpful if the groups organizing the Tea Party had a framework for taking action on important bills right away. Schedule visits to legislator offices. Form a Political Action Committee and get people to donate to it while they’re all standing right there. Give them the tools they need to go back home and start making a difference.
9. TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
It seemed like there were a dozen speakers on the docket last Thursday. (I’m not sure how many there ended up being, but it was in that area.) The crowd seemed like it would have been just as happy with maybe five or six high-caliber speakers, as opposed to a dozen speakers of varying quality.
10. FEWER SIGNS THAT REFER TO BENDING OVER AND GRABBING ONE’S ANKLES
This one is self-explanatory. I would pay cash money for people to avoid providing me with this visual.
***
The Tea Parties are on a roll – and getting people involved in spreading the message of limited government is always a good thing. But they could certainly build on those successes, and focus that discontent into actual change. And I’ll certainly be there next year to help. Until then, we should all be grateful we live in a country where we can go buy a sandwich that uses two fried chicken patties as buns.
God bless you, Founding Fathers.
For further evidence that the New York Times isn’t even trying anymore, take this paragraph from a story today about what polling says about Tea Partiers:
“Their fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”
Right – people are angry because Obama is helping the poor at the expense of the rich. Pity the poor rich people of America – who will hear their cries?
What neither of the reporters seemed to grasp (and yes, it took two people to write this story) is that conservatives believe the best way to help the poor is to provide them with employment opportunities. When government taxes businesses excessively, they have to shed workers. When government taxes individuals excessively, they have less money to support businesses, who then can’t give low-income people jobs.
But major newspapers will keep covering conservatives as if they’re some kind of alien life form that has just landed and formed their own colony. They do, after all, only make up between a third and a half of our country.
I just watched \No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson,” ESPN’s outstanding “30 for 30” documentary. It’s truly an example of what can happen when a network gives a great director the freedom to make the movie he wants. Iverson has always been one of my favorite players – if you can stomach the multiple arrests, he’s one of the baddest men on the planet. I wish I was as good at my job as he was at his (and had as many neck tattoos in the process). Plus, I was living in Blacksburg, Virginia at the time of the bowling alley incident featured in the documentary – so I recall the controversy going on at the time.
But during his whole college and pro career, one question has always been nagging at me: Did I play against Allen Iverson?
A bit of an explanation of my limited basketball career is warranted here. I was always short and hopelessly skinny. When I graduated high school, I weighed maybe 135 pounds. (A television station in Ethiopia actually had a telethon for me.)
After playing ball my entire childhood, I was cut from my high school’s freshman team. I was so angry, I signed up to play on a church league team where I vowed to take it out on the other kids that weren’t good enough to make their freshman teams, either. My signature play was to bring the ball up and shoot it. When the other team caught on, I’d switch it up and let someone else bring the ball up and pass it to me. Then I’d shoot it.
As it turns out shooting was the one thing I could do. As my dad always told me, “there’s always a spot on a team for a guy who can shoot.” I spent almost every waking moment at the court by my house, heaving up one three pointer after another. I always envisioned whatever girl wasn’t talking to me at the time sitting in the front row as I drained a long game winner. And since no girls ever talked to me, that amounted to about 1.3 million game winners in the span of four years. (Occasionally, I was joined in one-on-one games by a former Milwaukee prep star known as My Dad, whose rough old man play left me with loose front teeth more than once.)
My sophomore year, I made the junior varsity team, but rarely played. I was, as is known in the business, the “human victory cigar” – when I came into the game, it was likely already decided. But that didn\’t shake my confidence. I recall one time in practice, I dribbled the ball from end to end on a fast break and jacked up a three-pointer. My coach blew the whistle and chastised me for not letting the defense we were working on set up. “You’d have to be a hell of a player to take that shot, anyway,\” he yelled, sarcastically. Next time down the court, I stopped at the top of the three-point circle and heaved up another shot. “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, SCHNEIDER?” he barked. “I just heard the part about you having to be a hell of a player to take that shot,” I said. He smiled. And I still never played.
The competition in Northern Virginia at the time was pretty good. We played Grant Hill, who was starring at South Lakes high school (he’s a year older than me.) Current ESPN analyst, North Carolina Tarheel and longtime NBA player Hubert Davis often played pickup games at a court near my house. The scene was sprinkled with other guys who went on to play Division I ball (we played some 6 foot 9 guy that went to Stanford, but I can’t remember his name. Stanford probably can’t, either.)
But it wasn’t until a trip down to Virginia Beach after my sophomore year that my eyes were opened as to what competitive basketball really was. Old Dominion University has a team basketball camp every summer, where high school teams travel down together to the campus for a week of instruction. Most of the teams there were from the Hampton/Virginia Beach/Norfolk area, which is one of the most fertile athletic areas in the United States. Michael Vick is from there. Bruce Smith is from there. Lawrence Taylor. Alonzo Mourning (who set the state record for blocked shots against my school when I was in 8th grade.) Golfer Curtis Strange. (It’s true. Meant to be funny, but still true.)
It should also be noted that of the twelve teams in attendance, there were five white guys – total – at the camp. And three of them were on our team. Now, I was certainly no newcomer to the racial realities of basketball. My school is currently 37% white and 26% African-American, due to a large number of middle class black military families that lived nearby. (I also have my school’s racial makeup to thank for introducing me to Go-Go music, a unique D.C. style that gives the people more bongos than they can handle.)
At courts near my house, I was often the last one picked based almost exclusively on my skin hue. Our team had traveled into Washington, D.C. to play some of the schools in the city, where the stands featured exactly zero white faces. Our biggest rival, T.C. Williams High School (of “Remember the Titans” fame) had become a majority black school by 1990, with a large percentage of their students living in tough economic circumstances. When we played them, be actually had to be accompanied to the locker room by hired guards. (T.C. Williams also had to move their football games from Friday night to Saturday afternoon, as their fans occasionally got a little trigger happy during the night games.)
But once we stepped on the court with some of these teams that came from areas like Hampton and Norfolk, it was a completely different story. We weren’t playing rich-boy Northern Virginia basketball anymore. We lost our first game by something like 80-20. By our third game, we ended up passing the ball back and forth for minutes at a time to avoid being completely blown out.
But then there was one game that I can’t forget. I was guarding a point guard who was probably my height at the time (about 5 foot 7). He had a bandage wrapped around his shooting hand. At one point in the game, he dribbled the ball up and passed it off. I felt a screen hit me from behind. When I wheeled my head around to look at where he should have gone, he wasn’t there. He had completely disappeared. A fraction of a second later, I turned all the way around and looked at the rim. I saw his bandaged hand six inches over the rim, catching an alley-oop and dunking it. I must have stood there, stunned, for what felt like 10 minutes. I\’ve never seen anything like it before or since. It was a world-class athletic move from a guy not old enough to drive a car.
It was only a few years later that it occurred to me that it’s possible I was playing against a future NBA hall of famer that day. (And it wasn’t future Milwaukee Buck Joe Smith, who was there with his Maury High School team.) After all, almost all the teams there were from Iverson’s area. On the negative side – I’m 3 years older than The Answer, so if it was him, he was 13 or 14 years old at the time – which makes the athletic feat I witnessed even more implausible.
The real answer is that I’ll never know if I played against Allen Iverson. Maybe he was at the camp but on a different team altogether. Maybe he was back in Hampton, playing on an asphalt court. But I have to admit, I kind of like not knowing whether he was there. So at least I know there was at least a chance.
Incidentally, our team actually went on to the state tournament the next season. I even managed to get into a game, get fouled a few times, hit 5 of 6 free throws, and get mentioned in the Washington Post. So we were actually a good team – just not Virginia Beach good.
(SIDE NOTE: Rather than actually going on dates and stuff, my friends and I spent an inordinate amount of time filming ourselves dunking on a hoop outside my friend Dennis’ house. Please, come bask in the awkwardness with me:)
The big news around the conservative blogosphere today is this dope who decided to announce that he wanted to infiltrate tea parties and yell racist things, in order to make “tea baggers” look bad. (I would suggest he yell things like “black children deserve to stay in terrible schools!” since that is actually his party’s platform.)
Something smells here. It’s just too stupid to announce publicly that you’re going undercover to make your opponents look bad. Now, if any nutjob at any tea party in America says anything intemperate, tea partiers have an instant out. “It was liberals trying to make us look bad!” (And trust me – if any idiots show up with “Obama is Hitler” signs or whatever, they will be covered. I wrote about last year’s tax day rally, and there were a couple of “those” people there – and naturally, they showed up on every local newscast.)
So in the end, this guy publicly urging the infiltration of tea parties is actually doing his opponents a big favor. Which made me think that this might be an elaborate ruse. Maybe this guy is actually a conservative operative, who urges people to become liberal operatives, then blows the whistle on his plan in order to help conservatives. Basically, he’s a triple agent. It’s brilliant. In fact, it seems likely, given that it’s too smart to have been thought up by any of these lefty troglodytes.
This is also a big win for actual racists, who can now show up at the tax day rally and yell whatever they want with impunity. For these people, just do us a favor – wear a Nancy Pelosi t-shirt. Thanks much.
Long story short: A few months ago, I wrote a jokey post for the now-defunct SportsBubbler site, in which I urged the Bucks\’ Brandon Jennings to stop tweeting. Not so much because I wasn\’t dying to know what race of women he prefers to date, but because I didn’t want him to get himself suspended. (Two days after I wrote the column, Jennings was fined by the NBA for tweeting too close to the end of the game. Total BS, if you ask me.)
That column led to me exchanging some e-mails with writer Davy Rothbart, who was working on a story about Jennings for GQ Magazine. He wanted to know if I had any background info on Jennings, or questions I would ask him for the story. I unloaded a bunch of stuff to him, as I think Jennings is one of the rare athletes who will actually tell you what he thinks.
After publication of the GQ story, I got a care package from Rothbart. Inside it was a note from Jennings. Here it is:
Of course, this is awesome on so many levels. It’s clear he saw my column about his proclivity for ribald tweeting, but didn’t take it as me being critical of him. And it appears he also has a sense of humor about the whole thing. And finally, anyone who incorporates dollar signs into their own nickname is on another level.
So this will forever go on the memorabilia wall. Many thanks to Davy Rothbart for getting Brandon to sign it. And I hope that for the sake of everyone’s entertainment, Brandon never stops twitting.
Over the weekend, I was rooting around in some old junk in the basement, and came upon a journal I kept when I was six years old. (Don\’t ask why a first grader would keep a daily journal – clearly, I had a lot on my mind. Although it figures that I would be a blogger well before anyone had a computer.)
At the time, I was living in Hawaii while my dad was stationed there for military duty. The entries begin in March of 1980 and run until May of that year, when we moved to Virginia. Interspersed between scribbled pictures of Star Wars, Star Trek, and King Kong were timeless passages like these: (click on them to make them bigger)
On April 8 of 1980, I touch on something that would be a theme in my life for the next couple of decades:
Notice that I never said I actually caught any of these girls that I was trying to kiss. And that I denied it until the bitter end. Six year old pimpin’ ain’t easy.
Earlier in April, I discussed seeing a movie called “The Wax Museum,” – I think I was referring to the 1973 movie “Terror in the Wax Museum.” I still kind of vaguely remember seeing it.
Blek blek blood!
Also in April (date unknown), I tell what must have been the first joke I ever wrote down:
On April 15, I returned to the subject of chasing girls at recess. At this point, I had recruited my own little gang (called \”The Braves\” to help me. We even had our own cheer.)
Clearly, to be a member of The Braves, you also had to be able to draw the U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek.
Finally, in this one, I tell the tragic story of what happened when someone stole my lei. (Remember, we were in Hawaii:)
That’s right, James – I’m still looking for you. Thirty years of revenge is about to be exacted on your “guts,” my friend. All for stealing a flower necklace that was likely purchased for fifty cents. You better hope I never find out what your last name was.
And there’s a lot more. I recognize this is all self-indulgent, but it’s amazing to catch a small glimpse at was rattling around your brain at six years old. It gives you just a little portal into who you were when you think you were someone else completely.
Here’s the website of the school I attended. Go Cougars!