great. i never really wanted a master’s degree or anything, but if even shaq’s got one, how lazy does that make me?
“It’s just something to have on my resume [for] when I go back into reality,” the 7-foot-1 Miami Heat center said before picking up his master’s in business administration. “Someday I might have to put down a basketball and have a regular 9-to-5 like everybody else.”
…
For the University of Phoenix, a national for-profit college that caters to working adults, the Big Graduate did online work, and, before he was traded, attended classes several days a week at a West Los Angeles campus. Fellow students weren’t intimidated, he joked.
“They would all say, ‘You’re not like we thought you would be. You’re not as smart as we thought that you would be,”’ O’Neal said.
O’Neal, who left the Lakers following a well-publicized feud with Kobe Bryant, said his job experience came in handy in the classroom.
“I used my basketball experience working with different egos, to get everybody to work together,” he said.
But O’Neal likes to be in charge. He previously took courses at a police academy and said he’ll aim for another degree, in criminal justice. He hopes to eventually work as a sheriff or police chief and said he met some people in those top positions with advanced degrees.
“I wanted to have the same type of knowledge that they had,” he said.
O’Neal worked with classmates to design mock sneaker and cell phone companies, though he already had more than a little experience in the business world from product endorsements, his own clothing line and forays into movies and music.
The degree, he said, “solidifies that I’m a businessman.”
The Big Executive is ready to take on Bill Gates and Donald Trump.
“I could always go and have a conversation with Mr. Gates or Mr. Trump. But now that I have this,” he said, “I can really have a conversation with them on the same level that they have their conversations.”
no, i’m not talking about that. i’m not even linking to that.
i can’t even read espn or any other even vaguely sports-related site or article today.
however, during the last good day on tuesday, not only did events occur that made me happy and not nauseous, but i saw something else unexpectedly great: batman begins.
this restart of the batman franchise hits everything on the mark.
it’s sad that michael keaton was the best batman of the last series. not to harp on an old complaint, but how bad does it have to be when mr. mom is your best effort? he didn’t look scary, he didn’t look rich or suave, and he certainly didn’t look like he could kick your ass. he did, however, have excellent very intense eyes, which i guess works well if that’s the only thing that’s not covered by your cowl.
val kilmer was a joke. or maybe it was just tommy lee jones and jim carrey? but who knew that you would wish for the days of jim carrey instead of trying to believe arnold governator as cryogenic SCIENTIST gone bad mr. freeze? and george clooney with rubber nipples? shouldn’t alicia silverstone have had those instead? or at least uma!
the best one is probably batman returns, with michelle pfeiffer and danny devito doing good turns as catwoman and the penguin. although that whole christopher walken as (department store owner?) max shreck plotline was a little odd, it turns out it was originally written to be asst. DA harvey dent instead, who would then be scarred at the end of the film and become two-face in the third movie.
regardless, this new one is the way that batman was meant to be. darker, grittier, and finally a batman that makes you believe that HE COULD KICK YOUR ASS. christian bale’s fang-like toofers also don’t hurt either. i thought it was brilliant to tie in the crux of the movie (bruce’s fight to overcome his fear and become batman) with the scarecrow, and i loved the little inclusion of ra’s al ghul.
michael caine makes for a much better alfred than that other pudgy guy, and garly oldman is oddly likeable and almost perfect as a young (not yet) commissioner gordon!
and of course, the new batmobile. dark knight-inspired and just fucking awesome. really. i read in the latest american cinematographer that all those scenes are real: they used real cars, real car chases, and real car crashes. god bless ‘em.
if you can, see the special imax version. it’s the same aspect ratio as the 35mm but the resolution is digitally enhanced and it’s HUGE and takes up your entire field of vision. it’s gorgeous. how do they do that from a 35mm print? well, according to the tech museum:
To create the brightness and clarity that audiences have come to expect from the IMAX Dome, IMAX uses a computer program to make the images sharper, while colors are adjusted for the unique technically superior characteristics of the IMAX Dome screen. The completed re-mastered film is then transferred onto the world’s largest film format, IMAX 15-perforations 70mm.
for all those keeping score at home, hmc was right. i was not right. hmc is smart.
are you still here?
go. see. it. already.
what, you won’t leave me alone until we talk about the elephant? ok, fine.
pistons, down 3-2 and back in san antonio, more than spoil the spurs’ plans for a thursday victory parade! with big games from rip, tayshaun, chauncey, and ‘sheed, we’re instead on for the take-it-all game seven!
hell yeah.
this is great: a rotary phone turned cell phone, complete with batteries. just plug in your sim card, and you can call from anywhere? now that’s convenience!
this is weird: jewelry made from doll parts. sort of creepy, yet captivating.
bp remarks to me that i haven’t been talking about basketball recently, which should be odd, as the pistons are back in the finals.
the truth is, i’m on pins and needles. san antonio blew out detroit in the first two games, but then we came back and blew them out at home during the second two games. it’s all tied up! tonight is the pivotal game five. i feel like the winner here takes the series. it’s a HUGE game.
not to bore anyone with details, but i did love this analysis of the effect of the fro on big ben wallace’s (and thus the pistons’) play:
In this must-win Game 3, No. 3 had seven points, four boards and five blocks after a quarter. Wallace waited all of four seconds, actually, before knocking a ball loose and roaring to the other end for a fast-break dunk that gave the desperate hosts the perfect launch to what would be a 96-79 victory.
…
One more time I’ll ask: Why, Ben, don’t you go ‘fro at all times?
It is Wallace himself, remember, who once announced that he “jumps a little higher” when his hair flies freely. “Makes me feel lighter on my feet,” he says. Even wife Chanda, after Big Ben was shredded by the nation’s press for his inability to punish Nazr Mohammed in San Antonio, told her man before Tuesday’s tip to just “let your hair out and play.”
To me, all that adds up to the very definition of a head-scratcher.
Pistons insiders counter by telling you that Wallace does adhere to an intricate hair plan: Fear The ‘Fro at home, cornrows on the road. Chanda is the only stylist Wallace allows to work on the hair, and she tends to braid it down for Ben so it holds for a whole trip. Easier maintenance, you see.
True to form, Wallace played both games in San Antonio sporting cornrows and a headband.
Still …
If you jump higher and feel lighter one way, that strikes me as reason enough to rethink your plan.
The Pistons, though, don’t see it that way. If it were my team, I’d make the ‘fro mandatory, but after seeing the glare Ben shot at me for asking about his hair schedule after Tuesday’s triumph, I can at least understand their perspective. As team president Joe Dumars always tells me: “Who’s going to tell Ben he can’t wear it the other way?”
right before trying to stumble out of the house to go out and have dinner, i realize: i’ve spent all of my cash on strippers and drugs.
boingboing notes that neal stephenson has an op-ed piece in today’s ny times in which he claims that the first star wars trilogy isn’t as bad as you think because you miss the backstory and rich context:
Likewise, many have been underwhelmed by the performance of Hayden Christensen, who plays Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Only if you’ve seen the “Clone Wars” cartoons will you understand that Anakin is a seriously damaged veteran, a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder. But since none of that background is actually supplied by the Episode III script, Mr. Christensen has been given an impossible acting task. He’s trying to swim in air.
In sum, very little of the new film makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What’s interesting about this is how little it matters.
this is bullshit. LOTR entertained millions of people who haven’t read the books and don’t know all the stories and the lore and the parts that peter jackson left out. while it’s nice to have a rich history and to be able to throw in references that people who are familiar with such things can pick up on, having a movie that allegedly depends on knowing the fan lore and can’t stand up on its own merits is ridiculous.
did you have to know the life story of william randolph hearst to enjoy citizen kane? did you have to read the secret wars issues of the amazing spiderman to enjoy spiderman 1/2?
hey, i’m no famed award-winning science fiction author, but i can tell you this:
the only good part of star wars III: revenge of the sith is when anakin puts on the mask and fully becomes darth vader, because THIS IS THE POINT WHERE WE NO LONGER HAVE TO WATCH HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN TRY TO ACT.
the george foreman grill
bought on craigslist for ten bucks
doesn’t cook for shit
ok, this really is too obscure for, uh, maybe anyone except for me. i normally hate espn’s the sports guy for his blatant anti-pistons bias, although he talks about the pistons a lot so at least i get to read about them. still, i have to agree with this little quip on his play-by-play experience of watching game 3 of the nba finals between the spurs and the pistons:
last night we went to see the new miyazaki film, howl’s moving castle instead of going to the black and white ball, which apparently everyone and their mother did instead. which was just as well, as i hear later that it ended up being a lot of really rich people watching the violent femmes and vomiting a lot. a lot. i’ve got stories of people having to clean rich people vomit off of AV cables and thick carpets drenched with upchuck.
granted, there was upchuck-like substances in howl, but it was much cooler in the form of nebulous evil beings and physical manifestations of depression and malaise. of course, the movie was beautiful to watch, and it had a great story. sadly, we were forced to watch the dubbed version and not the subtitled one as advertised. this is what you get when you are too stupid to buy tickets for the premiere at the ghibli festival at the PFA, where they were playing the subtitled version.
the interesting thing that hmc and i remarked upon was that the conflict in miyazaki movies is never depicted as simply black or white, in that the antagonist is never simply and truely just “evil”. instead he lets you see their motivations, and understand that there’s a reason for them doing whatever it is they’re doing, even though it may be against what the protagonist wants. you wind up with marvelous illustrations of shades of grey.
obviously, for government officials, there’s nothing to see here. please move along.
we all went out last night to get loaded up and see strippers.
when i say “we”, i mean mamaluna + papaluna, xz + danger, and hmc and me.
when i say “loaded up”, i mean drink some drinks with the fire water inside. strange concoctions with sake and vodka and disclaimer amounts of fruit juices just to satisfy usrda requirements.
when i say strippers, i mean strippers.
how much better is seeing strippers with three girls than seeing strippers without three girls? THREE TIMES AS BETTER, of course.
why? well, bucko, sidle on up here and i’ll tell ya why:
more bang for your buck: sure, you can sit in the front row and throw out dollar after dollar onto the stage as if you were a change machine at the laundromat, and maybe you’ll get a little wiggle waggle, or maybe even a “hello, how do you do?” jiggle. but if you’re a girl and we throw a couple of bucks down in front of you, man you’ll get the treatment royale. you’ll get the rub up, the rub down, the double backside triple flip, and then some! why? because you’re a cute girl surrounded by two other cute girls, which reads fun and nice! not some lonely guy sitting next to some other lonely guy, which reads creepy at best and CREE-PEE at worst. i can guarantee that you’ll never get the stripper to stick her head underneath your skirt and BLOW ON YOUR KITTY. and that’s what happened to danger. yee-haw.
i could go into details, but after a while, it all just blurs into a big jiggly mess, right? let it be said that we got lap dances for all the girls, and all the girls were happy.
i think this was originally supposed to be a birthday stripper visit, but if it’s not in the same month as my birthday i tend to forget, so in my head it ended up being a “buy all the girls their first lap dance” visit.
so it was written, so it shall be done.
from 2sickbastards in the uk:
george and saddam, meet britney and christina.
finally, after days of cajoling and trying to induce all the different factions to proceed with their obvious mayhem, we finally got our brawl last night.
no, we didn’t get the bikers to beat up the hackers, nor did we get the pride paraders to spray paint every harley pink.
we just went to the roller derby.
the texas rollergirls are an honest-to-god all-women ass-kicking roller derby league. there are four teams that rumble six times a year and then they have a championship game. like they say:
the match we saw involved the catholic school dropout hell marys against the girl gang hot rod honeys, and the 70’s divas hustlers against the rodeo sweetheart honkey tonk heartbreakers. all you really need to know is that these girls are really hot, really dangerous, and they skate really fast.
seriously, they kicked ass. this is no slow ride in the park. they’re whipping around that little track, dodging the other team’s blockers, knocking each other down and just doing some amazing things on skates. some girls were incredibly fast, dodging attempts to block them, and other girls you just couldn’t knock down, no matter how hard you tried. there were fights and brawls, and since it’s all flat track, sometimes when girls wiped each other out, they would go careening off the track and into the crowds, spilling beer everywhere.
fucking awesome. i love texas.
the other cool thing about this league is that it’s all skater owned: they split off from the other league in austin because they didn’t like how it was being run. this one is run as a democratic collective, so it’s totally power to the people. plus they also donate some of the proceeds from each bout to a local charity.
there was an article in the sfweekly last week about roller derby in the bay area, but it’s a whole lot of nothing. they’ve only got like 25 girls and they’re just practicing, not even having any matches. yet they’ve still managed to lose some teeth, which is either impressive or sad.
if you’re in austin on the fourth sunday of the month, do yourself a favor and go see this! they could have easily kicked the ass of the hackers, the bikers, and the pride parade combined. and even the ice bats, to boot!
what did we actually end up doing in austin? well, let me tell you:
barton springs is a natural spring fed public pool. which doesn’t sound that exciting, but then you remember that you’re in texas. which means that this spring fed public pool is HUGE. texas-sized, that is. it’s about 100m wide and two football fields long. perfect for cooling off on a hot summer day, although at 68 degrees i don’t know if ‘cooling’ really conveys the exact experience. perhaps something like ‘cryogenics’ is more apt. then again, it’s better than swimming in the pacific in the bay area.
what else is austin famous for? the bats!
About that time, BCI stepped in and told Austinites the surprising truth: that bats are gentle and incredibly sophisticated animals; that bat-watchers have nothing to fear if they don’t try to handle bats; and that on the nightly flights out from under the bridge, the Austin bats eat from 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of insects, including agricultural pests.
As the city came to appreciate its bats, the population under the Congress Avenue Bridge grew to be the largest urban bat colony in North America. With up to 1.5 million bats spiraling into the summer skies, Austin now has one of the most unusual and fascinating tourist attractions anywhere.
talking to the local folk, it seems like a lot of people here in austin haven’t actually seen the bats. it’s like a local attraction that only tourists go to see, but if you live here, you never get around to it. sort of like alcatraz or the empire state building. except that there’s a million of them, and they fly. however, it does seem to be a small source of civic pride, and i hear that the local minor league hockey team is called the ice bats.
with all these factions in town, hmc was desperate to start some sort of brawl between the three. we kept walking up to the hackers and telling them, “man, those bikers are talking some shit about you! they say that you guys couldn’t hack your way into an wet paper bag!” likewise, we’d bump into the bikers and tell them, “some of those hackers said that you guys are all talk. they could beat you on their scooters!” and as for the pride parade, well, we couldn’t find any of those guys. somehow they mysteriously vanished as soon as the parade was over. the best we did was to spot the dyke britney spears at the ecoset show at ego’s, so that was pretty good. she was pretty much dead on, same face and smile, only with a punky haircut and tattoos. and not married and pregnant. oh, and sadly, no rack at all. on the other hand, isn’t that half of what britney’s all about anyway? what is a britney without the rack?
since i’m out in austin this week, i decided to stay the weekend to enjoy the town, and hmc flew out today as well.
unfortunately things are fucked up at work, and so instead of spending a nice friday night in austin with my honey, i spend until 2am in a data center. whee!
it’s too bad, since there wasn’t much to entertain hmc while i was working on friday night. oh, unless you count the 10th annual republic of texas bike rally, that is.
20 thousand bikers in town, partying, parading, and raising hell. normally staying in a hotel in downtown austin is nice and convenient to sixth street, the main drag. this weekend it’s like sleeping on the center oval of the indy 500.
if that wasn’t enough, there’s a hacker conference in town as well. they’ve got a little table in the lobby, where they’re selling little hacker t-shirts, amidst all these bikers and biker babes carousing around.
as a show of support, we buy one of their t-shirts, that says “All my xterms -DISPLAY in Texas”.
somehow, we have no problem distinguishing the hacker conference attendees from the biker rally attendees.
oh, and did i mention the gay pride parade going on tonight?
it’s too bad there’s nothing to do in this little one horse podunk town.
are things always better the first time around?
the reason i ask is that i caught the stereo total show last night here in austin, since i didn’t manage to make it out to see them last week in sf (having just come back from austin that day). i remember seeing them last year and they were really a lot of fun. totally outrageous and adorable nerd rock/punk/electro/disco/rockabilly show.
they were still a lot of fun last night, but honestly, i don’t really know what was going on. they were either doing some elaborate act where they kept fucking up and starting over songs and pretended to be fighting with each other, or they were actually fucking up and starting over songs and actually fighting with each other. it was just a little weird and not quite the fun time it was last time.
but then i began to wonder: is that just nostalgia talking? or is the novelty of the act, or any act, just better the first time around?
likewise, we saw the pixies this past memorial day, and while the show was good, it wasn’t as great back in the day. they clearly looked older and tamer, and then i had the realization: THIS IS THE REUNION TOUR. this is like when the rolling stones get back together for the upteenth time. or when the eagles do it. or black sabbath.
all the kids roll their eyes and say, “who wants to see these old fuckers play, anyway?”
of course, it’s you. it’s me. we’re the old fuckers who want to see the old fuckers from our youth. that’s called nostalgia, chippy. that’s what we used to mock back in the day.
maybe the pixies aren’t that good an example. they’ve never really been that fantastic a live band anyway, since their performances are not unlike their “here comes my man” video where they stand there and just open their mouth when it’s their turn to sing a lyric. but instead of just mocking the lipsyncing that bands do in videos, it ends up being sort of like their live show: the music kicks ass, but they don’t.
i do have to admit that i got shivers hearing gigantic live, though.
maybe i shouldn’t feel so bad about it. it’s not like i’m going to see the men at work reunion tour or anything.
as i get off of bart at the oakland coliseum stop, the airbart bus is about to pull away, but i knock on the door and stop it.
i manage to sneak on, and then some others come on behind me as well. i suddenly see my dear friend stephanie from chicago, who is a. one of the cutest people in the world and b. out here interviewing for a curator position at BAM.
we were supposed to call each other and try to meet while she was out here, but were both busy with our respective agendas.
but thanks to happenstance, we got to spend some quality time together.
if you can call riding the airbart bus and running from gate to gate around the airport time “quality time”, that is.
instead of going to oracle for my wednesday meetings or packing to fly out to austin this afternoon, what did i choose to do this morning?
i choose a lovely trip to the department of parking and traffic to renew our residential parking permits. because they expired on may 31st. and it seems like it’s june already, and they’re nowhere to be found.
not that i didn’t try to renew them by mail, having sent in the renewal form and check two weeks ago. but seeing as the check hasn’t been cashed yet, who can afford to wait for the forms to end up in the proper pneumatic tube slot?
getting there shortly after 9am (note to future suckers: the office actually opens at 8am, so if you want to be there first thing in the morning you need to get up earlier, slacker!), i wait in the long ass line for about an hour, when i finally turn the corner and realize that the line doesn’t just wrap around, but there’s this whole back corner, just like disneyland. your wait from this point: until hell freezes over.
i’m in line so long that i:
when i finally get to one of the golden windows, i’m confronted by the SLOWEST TYPIST IN THE WORLD. i present the forms, and then i see her slowly type in the letters of my street address. i feel my stubble growing. i see her slowly type in the numerals of our license plates. i scratch helplessly at the plexiglass divider, trying to type for her. i watch as she mouthes out the letters as she keys them in. one finger at a time.
i die a thousand deaths.
of course she doesn’t know how to use the system. i mean, how many people are trying to get or renew their parking permits? oh yeah, ALMOST EVERYBODY. it takes her twenty minutes and the help of several people to try and do it, and then she can’t finish it.
i gain enlightenment. i am reincarnated. i forget everything again.
she tells us there’s an outstanding violation on the jeep. it’s the bullshit “failure to turn wheels on an incline” citation. the one we got on our street. which is flat. the one we contested months ago and never heard about. which they have no record of. of course. let’s not mention how i searched for any violations on the jeep online last month and came up empty.
i become a pop star. i am adored by millions. i am beset by scandal. i am spurned and forgotten.
finally, the other woman takes over, takes all of my money and fixes everything in five minutes. i escape with two parking permits.
if i was british i would feel some vindication, perhaps. being american, i don’t. i’ve wasted three hours of my life.
i walk out to my car, to find what there?
a parking ticket.