Apropos de Nada

When You Have the Goods, Exploit Them Fully; or, Why Les Miles Travels by Bus

2007-10-21T12:16:00.001-07:00

Given the considerable brass in Les Miles' trousers, getting through airport security must be a monumental effort for the LSU coach and, consequently, anyone behind him. If you missed it, here's the final minutes of the LSU-Auburn game:

I don't know what amazes me more, Les going for six when three would've won it, or his straight-faced "on what?" reply to Holly Rowe's question about the last play. While nursing screeching hangovers, several thousand Cajuns are probably collectively asking themselves, "Is our coach the luckiest moron alive or is it just that his brain is composed entirely of testicular matter?"

It's a question for the ages. One certainty is that Les Miles must be a hell of a lot of fun to play for. This is a guy who goes for it on five consecutive fourth downs against the number 3 team in the country. Faced with the choice of with a game-ending play call where two of the three possible outcomes are disastrous (going for the TD) or a call where the odds are at least 50% and probably much greater (kicking a field goal), Les opted for the former, because, in his words, "we had the opportunity to kick their asses."

Contrast that with Miles' mouthy counterpart in Columbia, S.C.

Several weeks ago, Steve Spurrier, ebullient from a rare, 16-12 win at Georgia got his digs in by quipping, "It wasn't like they were some big, powerful team…Vandy beat them last year." Yeah, about that, Steve … suck it.

Dink NeSmith Has a Hammer and All He Sees are Red and Black Nails.

2007-10-18T13:43:00.001-07:00

It apparently comes as a surprise to Dink NeSmith that the media is a two-way communication device. Which comes as a surprise to the rest of us, since, for nearly two decades, NeSmith has been running a chain of newspapers throughout Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

Although NeSmith claims that 74% of respondents to this piece "barked 'Amen,'" NeSmith still felt compelled to go after the other 26% with this piece, which clarified nothing about his original editorial, except that NeSmith believes it's his First Amendment right to not tolerate dissent, or something to that effect.

Fretting that "Erk is dead … and so is the storied Junkyard Dawg intensity," NeSmith last week proposed a pay-for-performance salary and bonus plan for Georgia coach Mark Richt that works like this:

"Your base salary will be $500,000. Your $800,000 radio/TV and $530,000 Nike deals go to the athletic association. You work for us, not them. You can earn it back and more. Each victory triggers a bonus. The bigger the game, the bigger the bonus. Win the SEC championship, get $1 million. Win the national championship, pocket another $2 million."

Worried, like the rest of us, that Georgia football has fallen off the plateau it reached between 2002 and 2005, NeSmith believes a fire needs to be lit under Richt, who, as a not-so-minor side note, is the winningest coach in Georgia history and one of the most coveted young coaches in college football. Never mind that Richt is only in his sixth season in Athens and perhaps it's a bit premature to draw trendlines.

What's important is that we all buy NeSmith's underlying assumption that business and athletics have the same dynamics and thus that the University of Georgia should take a business-minded approach to its athletics.

That three true freshman on the offensive line aren't pancaking people like Max Jean-Gilles did is just details. Details are for little people. And Dink NeSmith, in case you didn't know, is kind of a big deal. He's the president of Community Newspapers, Inc., which operates such media powerhouses as the Dahlonega (Ga.) Nugget and the Palatka (Fla.) Daily News.

NeSmith views himself as a major Bulldog shareholder trying to drive some upside. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

As always, Sen. Blutarsky at Get the Picture and Groo at DawgsOnline more than capably unwind NeSmith's tangled thread of illogic.

Groo boils it down to NeSmith wanting more hustle and being willing to pay for it. Richt, like any other coach, already has an incentive-based contract, although apparently it's not incentive-laden enough for NeSmith's tastes. Again, NeSmith assumes everyone thinks like him, except the other 26%, who hate free speech and want the terrorists to win. Blutarsky pokes a gaping hole in that assumption by asking, "Exactly why do you believe that Mark Richt is so crassly motivated by money?"

Indeed. I reckon $2M/year goes pretty far in Athens, and there are only so many yachts you can ski behind. We're talking about a guy who's adopted two kids from the Ukraine and goes on mission trips to Central America. A guy who, after presiding over the dominant FSU teams of the 1990s and bringing two SEC titles to a Georgia program that had gone through a two-decade drought, never heeded the siren call of a lucrative NFL contract. If Dink is unsure of Richt's desire to win, Dink can have a look at the FSU and Georgia trophy cases.

But since NeSmith insists on framing this in a business context in which Richt is motivated as much by dollars as by wins, Blutarsky asks why Richt would be willing to exchange his current package for one that carries the risk of a significant pay cut and, in the event that Richt politely declines, what coach would accept such a proposal? I'm left to wonder if NeSmith just assumes that Richt, perhaps like any of NeSmith's managers at CNI, will take any contract shoved in his face.

What amazes me about NeSmith is the following quote from his original piece:

"We expect victories. Our fans and the University have opened their checkbooks, within NCAA guidelines, to give you, the staff and the team fabulous resources to compete with the nation's best. Thanks to your leadership, we repeatedly recruit rosters of nationally ranked all-stars. It's past time for the investments to pay off."

Having reeled off his bona fides as a Bulldog supporter for nearly four decades, NeSmith claims an long memory of where Bulldog football has been. Trouble is, NeSmith still seems to be there, rather than in the present. College football's arms race – with its private jets for recruiting trips, $4 million annual coaching salaries, 100,000-seat stadia, indoor practice facilities and millionaires' club locker rooms – appears to have gone unnoticed by NeSmith. Florida and LSU, NeSmith must assume, stepped into a power vacuum created by Richt's not hustling hard enough.

Given all the glad-handing with alums, fans, media and administrators that Richt and other coaches have to do, I'm kind of sympathetic to current and former coaches like Jim Donnan and Nick Saban, who have been pretty surly in response to all duties not related to winning football games. When you add in megalomaniac über-boosters like Bobby Lowder, in whose footsteps NeSmith is dangerously close to treading, it's not much of a mystery why, for example, Steve Spurrier is currently coaching against his alma mater.

Of course Richt's boss, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans, could address NeSmith's issues far more knowledgeably than I or any other average newspaper reader. I suspect NeSmith knows this, which makes me, along with Groo and Blutarsky, wonder why NeSmith decided to air his grievances in newspapers rather than take it up with Evans directly. Aside from being a multi-millionaire donor, NeSmith is a former president of the Georgia Alumni Association and an emeritus member of the Board of Directors of the UGA Athletic Association.

Dink, if you want to get on Damon's calendar to tell him what you would do if you had his job, just call him. When he's not preoccupied with running the country's most financially and athletically successful ADs, I'm sure Damon's got all the time in the world to hear how a newspaper boss would run a Division I athletic department.

Game 7: Stepping away from the light

2007-10-15T15:36:00.001-07:00

Not gonna spend a whole lot of time analyzing the Xs and Os on this one, as this was one of those games where the details, frankly, just weren't important. In the wake of the obliteration in Knoxville, the subsequent fallout, and the potential for the first losing streak against Vandy in half a century, any kind of win is fine with me.

And, yes, this was an ugly win. So ugly that we needed a last second field goal to win it. So ugly that our players needed to be reminded that wins over Vandy are supposed to be perfunctory, not something you celebrate with a classless midfield logo stomp (save it for when you get consecutive wins in Jacksonville – hell, do that, I'll go Auburn 1986 on that logo).

So ugly, that, at halftime, with Georgia down 17-7, I was strangely unperturbed, given the pervasive, funereal vibe that has blanketed the Dawg Nation since the bright orange devastation two Saturdays prior. Along with my preseason hopes and expectations, I had soberly laid to rest the hope of Georgia beating anyone else left on the schedule besides, maybe, Troy. Being blown out in Neyland is one thing – unpleasant, but not unprecedented. Consecutive losses to Vandy would settle any debate about whether the program is in decline. Bulldog Coaches have been fired for less and may it always be so.

As we cross the season's midpoint, the problems with this team are well-documented: youth, shoddy fundamentals and the kind of gunshy gameplanning designed to preserve a struggling team from total self-immolation, but not to snatch wins by the jugular.

In other words, Chapter 16 in Georgia's Melvillian epic, Limping into Jacksonville, is already being written. All the standard plot elements for the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Wake are there: injuries to key skill players, defense riddled with doubts after early season setback(s) and a consequently dyspeptic fan base whose martini of tears is already in the shaker.

Which is why I was simply glad to get the win this Saturday and be done with it, style points be damned. As Doug noted, "coming off a 35-14 annihilation by Tennessee and down 17-7 at halftime against [rhymes with 'shucking'] Vanderbilt, the Dawgs were walking toward the light." What we needed was a reprieve, something to head off a schneid similar to last year's bleak October.

And this could be a particularly auspicious time for a change in momentum, for several reasons.

For one, Florida (4-2, 2-2) isn't exactly rolling. With two back-to-back losses gnawing at them, on tap next week for the Gators is a trip to Lexington to face Kentucky, who is coming off a huge win against a team responsible for one of the Gators' losses. Sure, they're the best two-loss team in the country and their two losses are a hell of a lot more respectable than our two losses. Regardless, the Gators' losses so far are evidence that someone has figured out how to slow the Tebow/Harvin blitzkrieg. And our bye week means Willie Martinez has two whole weeks to figure out how to work a DVD player, watch those Gator losses and gameplan accordingly while Florida splits its attention between us and a sky-high Kentucky team.

For another, two weeks from now, 5-2 is 5-2 and how you got there matters far, far less than the fact that you're not 4-3 and Vandy's homecoming bitch. It's the difference between columns, radio shows and message boards discussing the top 10 candidates to replace Willie Martinez and instead discussing "Well, hell, if Stanford can beat USC …" 5-2 means the burden of being on the bubble for an early December trip to Atlanta is probably off your shoulders, so you can roll into Jacksonville with a what-the-hell attitude, ready to see someone else's cornflakes get pissed in for a change.

For yet another, have I mentioned the bye week? Remember how I said intangibles like bye weeks don't matter? Yeah, about that … turns out they do. At least that was one of my takeaways from the Tennessee thrashing. (Other takeaways include that I should never, ever try to predict a score – the football fates apparently hate it when you try to telegraph their moves and their consequent vengeance is swift, excruciating and replete with flea-flickers.)

Anyway, since many of our problems are of the fundamentals variety – overthrows, drops, poor tackling, missed blocking assignments, off-sides, false starts, lining up in the neutral zone (the litany is never-ending) – we can use the off-week to rest up, heal, re-learn tackle football and fully repress any memories of Knoxville. Actually, two weeks is probably enough time to merely scratch the surface of what ails us. But it's the most time we'll have all season to work on this stuff, so let's value it appropriately. And, for once, blessedly, the bye week comes midway through the season, as opposed to right before the last game of the season when it's too late for any off-week adjustments to have an impact on the season.

The bye week is especially salient given who our next opponent is. In the early 1990s, then-Florida coach Steve Spurrier recognized the importance of the Georgia game to the title-starved Gators' SEC title hopes. Noting that the Georgia game typically came a mere week after what was usually a draining slugfest with Auburn, Spurrier lobbied for and won a bye week before the Cocktail Party.

Of course, it was a lot more than bye weeks that got the Gators to the 15-2 streak they currently enjoy in Jacksonville, but the difference in energy levels between the two teams on game day and the annual late October unveilings of new trick plays in the Gators' arsenal point to Spurrier's bye week productivity.

In 2007, Georgia finds itself where Florida found itself in 1990: If anything great is going to happen for this program, it must retake Jacksonville. In 2001, Mark Richt spoke often of "lifting the lid" off of the Georgia football program. SEC championships in 2002 and 2005 – our first since 1982 – were thought to be signs that the lid had been lifted.

Not so. Until we can win consistently in Jacksonville, there will still be a big orange and blue lid on this program. During Georgia's 2001-2005 renaissance, the Bulldogs' 1-4 record against the Gators screamed "Yeah, but…" The careful wording of Mark Richt's 24-4 record in "true road games" has always rankled me, because it sounds like the commenter is going out of his way not to mention the overall record outside of Athens, which becomes a bit less noteworthy when you add in Richt's 1-5 mark on the banks of the St. John's.

So I'm indifferent about last Saturday's results and I'm neither pessimistic nor optimistic about what lies ahead in Jacksonville. Conventional wisdom says we'll get thrashed. Of course, conventional wisdom said the same about Appalachian State against Michigan, about Colorado against Oklahoma, about Stanford against USC, about us against Auburn last year and on and on and on.

How Long, Willie?

2007-10-07T08:32:00.001-07:00

"We are gathered here today for celebrating this year of bicentenniality, in the hope of freedom and dignity.

We are celebrating 200 years … of white folks kicking ass. White folks have had the essence of disunderstanding on their side for quite a while.

However, we offer this prayer, and the prayer is – how long will this bullshit go on?

How long! How long? How long will this bullshit go on?

That is the eternal question man have always asked, 'How long?'

When man first got here, he asked, 'How long will these animals kick me in the ass? How long before I discover fire and stop freezing to death?'"

Richard Pryor, "Bicentennial Prayer"

At the end of the third quarter, I'd had enough. Watching a fully prepared Tennessee kick a fully unprepared Georgia's ass all over Neyland Stadium for three quarters had been sucking the life out of me, so I took what little was left and went for a run to shake off the malaise. While on the trail, Richard Pryor's "How long?" refrain was going through my head. This was the second consecutive ass-kicking Georgia had suffered at the hands of Tennessee, which has gone 12-5 against us since Vince Dooley retired in 1988. Tennessee is now 20-15-2 against us overall, so if you do a little math you can see that I've been watching Tennessee kick our ass for most of my life. Between 1975 and 1988, we were 3-0 against them, a tally that mostly occurred on Herschel Walker's watch.

So, indeed, how long?

First off, I'd like to take back most of what I wrote on Friday, particularly the part about Georgia having the coaching staff that "inspires more confidence in a big game setting." This is the second time in three years that Willie Martinez's defense has spotted an opponent a four-touchdown lead in the first half, getting gashed up the middle for over 100 rushing yards in the first 30 minutes of play. Given that Tennessee has struggled to run the ball all year and OC David Cutcliffe's bona fides as a passing game mastermind, it might have been fair to expect more of an aerial attack. But no matter: we didn't get a single soul into Tennessee's backfield all day, leaving QB Erik Ainge to do as he chose. And, seeing our confused LBs and DBs out of position for most of the game, Erik did what you'd expect a three-year starter to do: complete 77% of his passes.

Thing is, we saw this movie last year, when Tennessee torched Georgia in the fourth quarter en route to a 51-33 shelling. At the time, the blame fell on the turnover-prone offense, which gave Tennessee short field to work with for much of the second half. Still, when Fulmer crowed to his charges at halftime last year that "they can't stop our offense," that wasn't some idle boast: The Vols have scored 86 points on Georgia in two games, including 65 in the past five quarters.

So, Willie, how long? How long will this bullshit go on?

This isn't like trying to figure out how to stop the spread offense. This is Tennessee, good old meat-and-potatoes Tennessee. They've been running this offense since 1992. And this wasn't a particularly good version of it. Tennessee's running game was ranked 11^th in the conference going into this game. Gallingly, a ground game that averaged 130.2 yards a game raked us for 190 on Saturday.

Really, the first drive was all you needed to see to know what was going to happen: Georgia DLs getting blown off the ball as Tennessee RBs Arian Foster, Montario Hardesty and Lamarcus Coker churned through arm tackles to average, respectively, 5.8 and 4.9 yards a carry. That opened up a passing game that left burn marks all over Asher Allen and Bryan Evans.

On the other side of the ball, Georgia's ground game, which ran for over 300 yards last week and featured a returning Kregg Lumpkin, got swallowed whole in Knoxville, to the tune of 68 total yards at 2.8 yards/carry. Hell, the whole offense had less than 60 yards total at halftime.

There were a few high points: Tripp Chandler found his hands and led the team in receptions (4) and caught a touchdown that was almost reminiscent of P-44 Haynes in a rare moment of Tennessee's DBs being utterly being out of position. Demiko Goodman's touchdown catch was spectacular. Kregg Lumpkin played with a lot of fire, coming off injury, and had the team's longest run, for 10 yards.

In hindsight, it seems pretty clear that we ran into a buzzsaw. Tennessee's coaches, fighting for their jobs, had two weeks to watch film and prepare. Georgia's coaches, fat and happy from two straight conference wins, seemed pretty breezy just before boarding the bus to Knoxville.

But too much of what happened on Saturday was not an aberration:

Matthew Stafford's progression has been steady – but slow. The bad mistakes and five-interception games seem to be well behind him, but the timing and quick reads have far from fully arrived.

The inexperience of our OL really came to the fore today, but it's always been there. Against teams like Oklahoma State, Western Carolina and Ole Miss, you can cover up the shortcomings with screens, draws and misdirection, but the South Carolinas and Tennessees of the world will not be fooled. You can't make your OL bigger, faster, stronger and more experienced in a week.

But the defense, sheesh. At one point yesterday, the thought crossed my mind, "We can't stop the run, we can't stop the pass, we don't tackle – exactly what is it that we're good at?" I know we're young along the line, but there seems to be a good bit of experience among the LBs and DBs, which are whom you count on for heady play.

But on Saturday, you saw the full chain reaction that illustrates – for better or worse – the yin and yang of how a defense line and backfield works, or doesn't work, together: As the DL got pancaked, LBs and DBs had to adjust. Instead of stopping plays for no gain, their task was keeping five-yard plays from turning into home runs. And that's the nightmare scenario, because, if you're playing on your heels, eventually the dam will break, as it did on the trick play from Lucas Taylor to Lamarcus Coker.

Dawg fans will turn their lonely eyes to departed DC Brian Van Gorder, even though the last serious asskicking by an SEC team occurred on his watch. But that was in the SEC Championship game against an LSU team that went on to win the BCS Championship. Whereas Tennessee wasn't thought to be an SEC contender before yesterday and nothing would shock me more than to see Georgia re-enter the race anytime soon.

On balance, Martinez' defense usually does its job. But it is also given to moments of wild blunder, glaring lack of preparation, poor tackling and a lack of intensity that has been painfully obvious in opening drives, such as

The 2005 and 2006 Florida games,
the 2005 West Virginia debacle and
Saturday's Tennessee wipeout

And at the end of regulation against

Auburn in 2005,
Tennessee, Vanderbilt and Kentucky in 2006 and
Alabama this year

Van Gorder's defenses were staffed with players like David Pollack, Thomas Davis, Sean Jones and Odell Thurman – disciplined, mostly blue-collar guys who played like every play was the last play of the Super Bowl. Coach Van went 3-1 against Tennessee. With Martinez (1-2 against Tennessee), we're still waiting for plays like this:

and this:

Again, Willie, how long?

Anything happen while I was gone?

2007-10-05T12:06:00.001-07:00

Well, good Lord. I go on a little business travel, walk away from this thing for a few weeks and this is the world I return to? Kentucky playing South Carolina to decide who's the Beast in the East? A morning after in which half the top ten takes a demotion? In which, via transitive football herpes, USF looks like the best team in the Sunshine State (USF>Auburn>Florida>Miami & FSU)? In which the bloom is suddenly and emphatically off the Urban Meyer rose?

Seriously, I feel like I've returned home to find the kid has turned into Teen Wolf, the wife has run off with a lesbian biker gang and Britney Spears' career is fully restored.

When we last heard from our humble correspondent, he was enjoying music in the park, Georgia was toodling around with a directional Carolina school in advance of a journey into the jaws of Saban and South Carolina/Kentucky were mostly an amusing aside in an SEC story principally concerned LSU and its chainsaw genitalia. "When the going gets weird," Raoul Duke famously observed, "the weird turn pro."

Today, we find ourselves in a world in which tickets to the Red River Shootout are as easy to find in Dallas as BMWs parked in front of mobile homes. Fortunately, there are familiar sights to sustain us in this brave new world.

Still, we find ourselves entering terrain in which nothing is what it seems, even when clad in red and black. In a stark role reversal from most of the Mark Richt era, it's the Georgia defense that seems plenty good on paper and yet still needs the offense to save its ass in critical moments.

And while other offenses pack the pews at the Church of the Spread Option, Georgia's contentedly lines up in the I-formation and runs toss sweeps for 300 yards like it's not a day past 1982. Remember all those concerns about the mostly underclassmen offensive line and its new position coach, Stacy Searels? Granted, they're not the '82 Redskins OL, but they have their moments, like this one:

That brings us to Knoxville, which in recent years has gone from house of horrors to home away from home for the Bulldogs. For Georgia and Tennessee fans alike, there are some tasty matchups to look forward to: Georgia's prolific running game vs. Tennessee's porous rushing defense, Tennessee's equally prolific passing game against Georgia's interception-allergic secondary, the inevitable Georgia punt return for a touchdown that has been a staple of every Georgia-Tennessee game since 2001, the Jekyll-and-Hyde Georgia passing game against Tennessee's flag-football secondary.

When I don't know what the hell's going to happen, I look at which team has the more experienced QB (Tennessee), the team that can run the ball (Georgia), the team with the nastier defense (Georgia, with a stack of "ifs" and "buts") and whose coaching staff inspires more confidence in a big game setting (Georgia – and I think there's no shortage of Tennessee fans who would readily 'fess up to that). South Carolina had the same advantages last night that Georgia brings to Knoxville on Saturday and that worked out all right for the Gamecocks.

When those answers are inconclusive, I start looking at intangibles. Tennessee has the home crowd, albeit one that can be quickly silenced for long periods after a big play (the quintessential example being Sean Jones, 2003). Tennessee has had the all-important immediately preceding bye week (I contend to this day that Ron Zook owes much, if not all, of his 2-1 mark against Richt to preceding bye weeks). Tennessee has also spent the last two weeks hearing about the supposed hot seat under its head coach's considerable can. Of course, that one can go either way: the result could be "Win one for the Pumpkin" or merely self-fulfilling prophecy. Sports psychology is a fascinating, but highly speculative science – or a voodoo designed to enrich bookies.

The intangibles favoring Georgia are Richt's 22-3 road record (some of which I attribute to the fact that our players can't hear our "fans" booing) and the fact that its defense ought to have one hell of a case of red-ass from last year's 51-33 meltdown in Athens. Then again, Florida expected vengeance against Auburn last week and look how well that worked out. Also, Georgia is an underdog, in spite of being ranked higher, so there's a disrespect factor.

With all that said, "intangibles" are mostly something for pundits to fill on-air minutes and column inches with. Repeatedly, I've read comments from coaches and players that intangibles impact the first five running minutes of a game and after that, "you're just playing football." When I've coached teams, my advice has typically been to clear all the voices out of your head and just play. Home crowds, off-weeks, pollsters, Vegas oddsmakers and Internet rumors won't make your QB go through his reads better or help your RBs find their holes quicker.

As Richt noted, the off-week is good for shoring up fundamentals that may have eroded during the season and for having a more thorough dress rehearsal for a game. But it's not enough time, say, to install a new offense or re-wire your defense. Tennessee is tweaking its depth chart on defense and I'm sure they're working on their OL blocking schemes.

But I don't think Phil Fulmer is the kind of tactician to pull of what Urban Meyer did with a week off before Jacksonville in 2005, in which he excised large portions of his playbook to accommodate the fact that QB Chris Leak would never have the mobility and hard-nosed attitude to run the spread option. Plus, they switched jerseys to the retina-searingly ugly single orange sleeve, utterly devastating the delicate sensibilities of Georgia fans who seize over fashion faux pas like jorts. Instead, Tennessee is going to try to do what they've been doing all season (and, really, for much of Fulmer's and David Cutcliffe's shared tenures), but with better execution.

It's important (and aggravating to absolutely no end) to note that Tennessee is 2-0 against us with Erik Ainge as its starting QB. Given time in the backfield, he will perform open-heart surgery on our secondary. With Marcus Howard and Jeff Owens dealing with various ailments, the first thing I'll be watching for is how much pressure we're putting on Ainge up front. I wouldn't be surprised to see Tennessee leverage off-week blocking drills into an impressive opening drive. The question is how well and how quickly can Willie Martinez adjust?

On the other side of the ball, Tennessee will doubtless look better on D than they've looked in weeks past. They've had two weeks to re-learn tackle football and to hear about how soft they are. When they don't look like what we expect them to look like (as they inevitably won't), will it be smarter to start flinging it around or stay hammerhead with the running game until we establish the damned thing?

Special teams are the real X-factor here. Punt returns, blocked punts, squibbed kick-offs and blocked field goals have defined this series since 2001. There is simply no excuse for either team to discount the importance special teams in this game. If it were Tommy Tuberville at UT's helm with two weeks to prepare, you could bet the mortgage on this being a trickeration fiesta in orange. But, like Lloyd Carr, Fulmer has made his bed on burying opponents on talent alone – to hell with fancy plays.

So, having laid out my qualifiers, I expect to win, but by no means comfortably and by no means is that a comfortable expectation. Something along the lines of 30-24 or 34-30 seems reasonable.

Ready, sweat, rock: Austin City Limits 2007

2007-09-16T22:30:00.001-07:00

Returning to Austin has meant a return to the short hiatus from college football I take at the mid-point of September to take in the Austin City Limits music festival. Usually, Georgia is tuning up on a cupcake (like Western Carolina this year) and Florida and Tennessee are tangling in what, to me, amounts, to an annual Blimp Crash Bowl (so dubbed for the best possible outcome of such a retina-searing assembly of orange). So I let the DVR do its thang while I get my rock on.

Also, as next year's ACL likely will find me either changing diapers or attending to a very pregnant wife (not announcing anything here, just stating what's on the '08 agenda), this year's ACL could be my last for a while. Which is fine. In general, as I move farther from my 20s, I'm less and less enchanted with outdoor music festivals, particularly the variety that involve 65,000 people and late-summer central Texas heat, both of which ACL brings with a fury.

But while those factors have always presented a tolerance hurdle, ACL, now in its sixth year, always rewards your effort. ACL is consistently one of the best-run festivals I've ever attended and there's probably not a better bang for your buck anywhere: a three-day pass costs less than $200 (even less than $100 if you get in on it early) and gets you lineups as outstanding as this year's, which featured Bob Dylan, Arcade Fire, Wilco, My Morning Jacket, Arctic Monkeys, Steve Earle, The National, Bloc Party, Spoon, the Killers, Bjork, Stephen Marley, Damien Rice, Muse, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Beau Soleil and several dozen others. So impressive was the lineup that cancellations by the White Stripes and Amy Winehouse went practically unnoticed. Past ACLs have featured R.E.M., the Pixies, Al Green, Coldplay, Elvis Costello, Broken Social Scene and much more.

The festival takes place across seven stages in Zilker Park, which has more than enough acreage to handle the crowds and the ingress and egress is a hell of a lot less painful than some of the cattle drives I've been herded through to see music. There's bus service all over town, an adjacent bike park and throngs of rickshaws, all of which serve to diffuse traffic so effectively that ACL bears no resemblance whatsoever to the endless phalanxes of cars that creep with glacial speed into Manchester, Tenn., for Bonnarroo. With its streams of bicycles, mopeds, rickshaws and pedestrians, Barton Springs Road last night resembled a street in Bangkok or Saigon. But unlike Bangkok, Saigon or Bonnaroo, ACL leaves a considerably narrower carbon footprint, from the biodiesel-powered generators to the recycled toilet paper in the porta-potties.

Perhaps due to the demographics of the ACL acts' fanbases (and the fact that they're not being treated like livestock), there's a kind of group consideration and respectfulness among ACL festival-goers that seemed remarkable in comparison to some of the chaotic festivals I've read about and participated in. My wife and I strolled easily in and out of ACL on Friday night with tens of thousands of other attendees who, by and large, evidenced none of the irritability that comes with milling about for several hours in 100-degree temps. We remarked that this cooperative atmosphere sadly wouldn't be possible in my wife's hometown of Memphis, where the Beale Street Music Festival has been marred racial, adolescent and drug/alcohol-fueled shenanigans and the kind of general idiocy that lends steep irony to the book title The Wisdom of Crowds. As ACL showed, enjoying good music with lots of people who also appreciate music is a practical, simple matter: you don't need to be bought in to some hippie utopian communal dogma to know how not to be a dick at a rock show.

And, yeah, in case I under-emphasized this, it's hot. Real hot. The dearth of trees in Zilker Park makes for great site lines, but, between noon and 6:30 p.m., it also makes you feel like you're an ant under some giant kid's magnifying glass. Based on crowd attire, I'm not sure the average Texan is aware that black attracts light, such as the burning variety beaming down from that fiery orb in the sky known as the sun, or that denim isn't what you'd call "breathable." That said, it's hard work looking cool, especially if you can't leave it at just being a state of mind. Wearing an all-white polypro t-shirt, polypro boxers and linen shorts, I probably dropped close to five pounds in water weight, so I can't imagine what these idiots in black jeans, boots and black shirts were going through. Fortunately, there's a gazillion drink stands, some water misters at the festival; plus the WaMu Tent, aside from some great gospel, blues and zydeco, also features shade, blessed shade.

Really, the hardest thing about ACL is the musical tradeoffs. Before the White Stripes cancelled, you were going to have to choose between seeing them and Arcade Fire for the Saturday closer. Tonight's show, which I'm missing due to business travel (yeah, but it's to San Francisco, a merciful change of weather), forces you to choose between My Morning Jacket and Wilco. Like South By Southwest, you're dogged by the feeling that, no matter how rockin' the show is you're attending, people are getting their minds blown a few stages over.

Regardless, you are bound to be treated to some pretty transcendent moments, like last night's Arcade Fire set. Like fellow Canadians Broken Social Scene, the Fire feature roughly a dozen people onstage playing a lot of unconventional instruments for rock 'n' roll, with each band member rocking out so aggressively that it's like watching a band with a dozen frontmen – impossible to fully digest all at once. They can be sublime, but rarely are they subtle.

In a smirking reference to the title of their latest long-player, Neon Bible, Arcade Fire took the stage under a widely viewed YouTube clip of the female televangelist notoriously exhorting her audience to take "an enema of the holy spirit … straight up the rear."

Arcade Fire opened their set with Neon Bible's first track, "Black Mirror," kicking off a stream of swooping, anthemic mini-symphonies arranged with violins, French horn, tuba and church organ along with the traditional guitar, bass, drums, percussion and keyboards. And while the Killers did a compelling job of kicking up vaguely high school drama the night before, it still seemed like adolescent bluster when contrasted with Arcade Fire's soaring hymns to deceased family and friends, existential angst and all the other Big Questions that roil with fear, exaltation, dread, hope, etc. With fraught song titles like "My Body is a Cage" and "Une Année Sans Lumière" ("A Year without Light"), Arcade Fire's music is the kind of big, Gothic sound instantly recognizable as something that demands to be played in arenas but, due to commercial interests, rarely is. Thankfully and as always, ACL delivered the appropriate venue at nightfall Saturday.

Game 2: “Frankly, I don't want to talk about it.”

2007-09-09T22:11:00.001-07:00

Years ago, in response to a Georgia loss to Georgia Tech, Lewis Grizzard made syndicated newspaper history, publishing a column that was almost empty, save for declaration above.

When South Carolina intercepted a Matt Stafford pass in the final seconds of Saturday's game, I was tempted to honor Grizzard with a similar post. But doing so would be neither original nor genuine of me, just a cop out. So I'll press on.

Losing to South Carolina is a rarity, but it's also a very ugly catharsis for Georgia fans. The game is played early in the season, when the possibilities are still at their most expansive and expectations are at their highest. Twenty-three years ago, my father greeted a South Carolina win over Georgia by sending a loafer through the drywall in our kitchen. It landed right below the wall phone and his "Goddamnit, Georgia!" was met by Mom's rejoinder of "Goddamnit, Len!"

Bulldog historian Dan Magill once said of Georgia Tech words to the effect that, if you don't think Tech is a rival, try losing to them. I think the same can be said of South Carolina or any other foe that you're used to beating. Witness South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier's post-game taunting.

Georgia's record against South Carolina before Saturday night's contest was 44-13-2. That averages to about one Gamecock win every five years. Given that it had been since 2001 since their last win against the Bulldogs, the Chickens were due – overdue by a year, in fact. I take it as an indicator of the series one-sidedness that, following each of the other five Georgia wins, it never occurred to any Georgia coaches to bother taunting South Carolina.

One of the weird things about college football, from the perspective of fandom or gambling, is that a team is rarely as good or as bad as its last game. Last year, Georgia shut out Spurrier for only the second time in his career and then went on to give up game-winning drives to Vanderbilt and Kentucky. In 2004, we shelled the defending national champions, LSU, 45-16 and followed that up with a 19-14 loss to two-time Peach Bowl runner-up Tennessee.

This year, as in 2005, Georgia looked unstoppable against an upstart team widely picked to upset us in our opener. The following week in 2005 and this year, our offense wet the bed against South Carolina.

This time around, South Carolina eeked out a 16-12 win, the result of equal parts stifling defense on SC's part and dropped or poorly thrown passes and questionable play calls by Georgia. Really, the details are not important. Fans can tear themselves up on message boards, call-in shows and sports blogs about whom to blame, but it's best to step away if you feel that's the direction you're being taken.

Losses happen. We spend so much time focusing on champions that we lose sight of the infinitesimally small odds that even an outstanding team has of going undefeated, much less winning a national title. Think about it in terms of probabilities: If you had an 80% chance of winning every game on your schedule (and you couldn't even say that about Georgia's 1980 national championship season), you'd have less than a 7% chance of going undefeated in the regular season: 0.80^12 = 0.068719.

On the subject of fans needing perspective, as Kanu noted, those who booed at Saturday night's game should just stay home from here on out. It's deer season, right? I don't care if they are phoning it in; booing a bunch of 18-22-year-olds is never, ever acceptable. We're already doing a bang-up job scaring off recruits as it is.

Georgia fans love to lecture other rival fans about class. We'll wag our fingers about Florida fans and jean shorts. We'll chide Tennessee fans about their choice of a shade of orange. We'll snort at Auburn fans about their football factory masquerading as a sociology department. Having watched Nebraska fans applaud a rival that just got done beating their team, it occurs to me that we Georgia fans know about as much about class as Paris Hilton does.

So we lost at home to an opponent we perceived to be inferior. So did Auburn. So did Michigan, whom our fans were busy taunting last week (remember the students with "Ha Ha Michigan" painted on their bodies? Yeah, where are those guys right now?).

So let's hug it out, get well against Western Carolina and get ready for what looks to be the beginning stages of a monster being built by Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa.

Game 1: Troglodytes 35, Greatest Offense in the Universe 14

2007-09-03T07:58:00.001-07:00

Our long march through the off-season desert is over and, rather than apologize for not having put together any previews of the college football season, I'll just acknowledge the exemplary work of the Dawg blogs on my blog roll: Doug at Hey Jenny Slater, Kyle and MaconDawg at Dawg Sports, David Ching at the Georgia Bulldog Blog, Sen. Blutarsky at Get the Picture and, of course, Paul Westerdawg at the Georgia Sports Blog. At my best, I might only have been rendered redundant. More likely, I would've been outclassed entirely. Frankly, since I'm not at practice everyday, it would have been impossible for me to write anything other than what had already been written: Youth on OL and DL, the impact of losing Paul Oliver on the secondary, depth at RB and WR, yada, yada, etc., etc.

So, with the season blessedly underway, let's get down to what actually happened and what it means for next week.

Georgia opened the season with one of its strongest non-conference season openers in years. I think you'd have to go back to 1983, when we opened with UCLA, to find us getting off the blocks against comparable competition. Freshly showered with T. Boone Pickens' millions, Oklahoma State is famously making its Big Move into the Big Boys' Club. These things take time, of course, and the early returns can be ugly. The year before its Fiesta Bowl stunner against Oklahoma, Boise State got its ears boxed in Athens, 48-13.

As others have noted, Oklahoma State is no Boise State. As a Big XII member, the Pokes regularly square off with Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M, Nebraska and others. They beat Alabama last year. They've played in big, loud stadiums – although they haven't fared particularly well as the road team – and their marketing department trumpeted the Cowboys as having "The Best Offense on Earth" or some such.

Anyway, by now, everyone knows how this thing wound up – 35-14, Georgia, in a game that, despite all of the parallels being drawn to the 2005 Boise State opener, was nothing like it. Yes, both BSU and OSU run spread offenses with mobile QBs who were supposed to run rings around our defense and make our offense look prehistoric by comparison. But Boise State was annihilated by halftime, with QB Jared Zabransky getting benched before halftime after throwing about a half-dozen picks. Whereas Oklahoma State was still very much in the game at halftime, down by what Georgia coach Mark Richt readily admitted was a "cheap" touchdown (Thomas Brown's 14-yarder from 1^st and 10 on the OSU 12) that was largely the result of an OSU special teams gaffe.

While many teams would have wilted after such a bad start, particularly with nearly 93,000 bourbon-fueled fans suddenly smelling a rout, Okie State clawed their way back into the game, piecing together a four-minute, 11 play, 70-yard (and that doesn't include a sack and a tackle for loss that totaled 11 yards) drive late in the second quarter to bring the game to 21-14. Georgia went three-and-out and, after OSU stalled on its next drive, we went into halftime, only head by that "cheap" touchdown.

This brings me to the real subtext of this game. Georgia, in 2007, is fielding a relatively young team that is more than a year removed from its last SEC title. We struggled badly with adversity in the middle of the 2006 season. With so many redshirt and true freshmen on the field this year, how would we respond to adversity early?

Troubling as OSU's last drive was, there was a pretty undeniable feeling that Georgia was controlling this thing. Concerned that my warm feeling might've come from the whiskey, I went back and watched the replay yesterday morning and checked the stats. Turns out my initial feeling was right. Georgia out-gained the Pokes in the first half 178 yards to 121, in spite of running five fewer plays. Georgia won the time of possession battle 16:25 to 13:35. It wasn't the gaudy domination of the Boise State tilt, but it was solid evidence of Georgia's upper hand.

The visual evidence was pretty compelling as well. Georgia's defense was swarming. Anyone in white with the ball was usually dealing, in very short order, with four or five red jerseys arriving promptly and with ill intentions. Efforts to spread the field east and west mostly left the Cowboys going sideways. Gang tackling abounded. Marcus Howard, Dannell Ellerbe, Rod Battle, Kelin Johnson, Geno Atkins, Jeff Owens and Brandon Miller seemed to be everywhere the ball was and the front four had a very regular presence in Oklahoma State's backfield. Of course, the second half confirmed the defense's dominance, as the self-proclaimed "Greatest Offense on Earth" mustered zero points in the remaining 30 minutes.

On the other side of the ball, Georgia's supposedly troglodyte offense looked crisp and brutally efficient, amassing 376 yards, no turnovers and a relative minimum of dumb penalties, save for a false start and an illegal formation. Every trip to the red zone (save for the last, when we were running out the clock) netted a touchdown. Aside from two bad passes right before half, when Matt Stafford wasn't planting his feet, the sophomore QB looked outstanding (18/24, 234 yards, two TDs, 0 INTs) – and so did his receivers. It was a genuine pleasure seeing the once drop-prone Sean Bailey return from ACL surgery to haul in five catches for 87 yards, including a spectacular reaching grab on the sideline and a stop-on-a-dime button-hook that he almost took to the house. Newcomers WR Mike Moore and TE Bruce Figgins caught one apiece – each for touchdowns. Mikey Henderson was his usual lethal self, receiving, returning and running for 103 yards.

An interesting stat popped up in Richt's Sunday presser: of Georgia's 234 passing yards, roughly 170 were yards after the catch. That may be a commentary on OSU's tackling, but, that was an important number to see, regardless. For years, I have tired of watching Georgia receivers collapse to the ground after catching a ball, either because Shockley or Greene wasn't placing the ball accurately enough or because, upon catching the ball, the typical Georgia WR thinks his job is done. During those same years, I have watched scores of Florida receivers put on track meets after catching a ball. If you watched Florida under Steve Spurrier in the 1990s, sure, they had accurate quarterbacks, but the real fireworks came after the ball was delivered. Why, I wondered, can't we have guys like that? Well, it appears we finally might.

But the real intrigue, strategically and tactically, lay in the running game. The best way to limit OSU's offense – or any offense, for that matter – is to not let them on the field. Grinding out the clock with screens and rushes for five and 10 yards a pop was the order of the day. But, from a tactical perspective, I think everyone was itching to see the covers come off Knowshon Moreno and whether reports were true of Thomas Brown's return-with-a-vengeance from ACL surgery.

The differences between the offense under the recently promoted Mike Bobo from when Richt called the plays were pretty subtle for the most part. I think Richt was inaccurately tagged a pass-first offensive coordinator, when, in fact, Georgia almost always rushed more than it passed. My criticism had to do with the timing of the running game, and how it would disappear once we crossed an opponent's 20, or any time it appeared to be having success.

Bobo seemed to recognize what happens to passing percentages as the field gets shorter and, accordingly, treated old-school Georgia fans to their version of mother's milk, the simple elegance of a toss sweep for a touchdown, one of two from Thomas Brown.

And while Brown got the touchdowns, Moreno got the yards. Spinning, sprinting, bouncing and battering his way forward, Moreno resembled a healthy Kenny Irons, rushing for 70 yards and receiving for 51. What jumped out at me was both his burst and balance. He was patient with his blocks and, as soon as the holes formed, KnoMo was gonzo. I can't recall him going down on first contact, nor do I remember it taking less than two people to get him on the ground. As long as he's healthy, I expect the kid to treat us to some spectacular runs.

Lastly, regarding the much fretted-over OL: I think they availed themselves well, but, as Richt noted at halftime, we weren't asking them for much. Mostly, we needed enough protection for Stafford to get a screen off or enough daylight for Brown, Moreno or Lumpkin (whom, sadly, we lost for a few games to a broken thumb) to get three yards. Oklahoma State's defense may be somewhat improved from their bottom-tier status in recent years, but it's safe to assume South Carolina and Jasper Brinkley will pose a much greater challenge up front.

So, where does that leave us? Well, notwithstanding Reshad Jones' personal foul, I think we've got a very disciplined team on both sides of the ball and one that happily plays smash-mouth. Given that Okie State brought in a new defensive coordinator, Bobo clearly logs his share of hours in the tape room. Rodney Garner, John Fabris and Willie Martinez have taken a young, talented defense and managed to pound some scheme into these Huns' heads.

I think we can expect more of a slugfest with the "bunch of average stiffs" Steve Spurrier will be bringing from Columbia. The Gamecocks' OL issues mirror ours and I don't expect QB Blake Mitchell to be poised any more than I expect Steve Spurrier to be forgiving when Mitchell makes mistakes under what ought to be pretty regular duress. Stafford will probably experience similar pressure from a reputedly solid South Carolina D, but will probably handle it a bit better than Mitchell, who was suspended in the Chickens' season opener, an uneven 28-14 win against Louisiana-Lafayette (SC was favored by 29). Spurrier is promising some lineup changes (a recurring theme this time of year at South Carolina), but I think we can expect to see many of that offense's mainstays: Mitchell under center, RBs Mike Davis and Cory Boyd and WR Kenny McKinley.

If we must jump the gun (we must! we must!), or What Braves & Birds said

2007-08-08T09:16:00.001-07:00

In accordance with this country's due process tradition, the accused are innocent until proven guilty (except when residing in Guantanamo, but I digress …). Still it's hard to attach the "innocent until proven guilty" phrase to sentences involving O.J. Simpson and now Mike Vick without making those silly quote signs with your fingers or using some other annoying disclaimer like "theoretically," "technically," or "quote-unquote." Because there's Guilty in a Court of Law and then there's "C'mon, even his mother knows he did it." Given the specificity of the feds' 18-page indictment and the fact that one of Vick's alleged co-conspirators literally told the feds where the bodies were buried, Vick appears to have fallen so squarely in the latter category as to render the former almost a formality.

Among the many things that can be said about the feds is that, when they get around to indicting the rich, powerful and heavily lawyered, the feds usually come correct. A recurring statistic in this Vick story is the feds' 95% conviction rate. That 5% is an exclusive club that rejected the likes of Martha Stewart, Jeff Skilling, Lord Conrad Black and many others. For that and many other reasons, it ought to be shitting-bricks time for Michael Vick, Purnell Peace, Quanis L. Phillips and Tony Taylor.

That brings us to the mealy-mouthed attempts at excuses coming from various quarters – such as the fact that the victims weren't humans (neither were Jeffrey Dahmer's first victims), that Vick is from a historically disenfranchised socio-economic stratum that views dog fighting more sympathetically, and more equivocations that, at their most cogent, merely serve to insult even the slightest of intellects.

As an ex-pat Georgian forced to view my birthplace through a national lens, I was nervous about how Atlanta would come out looking in this. Like many major metro areas in the South, Atlanta is a rapidly growing, majority-minority city in a largely rural state and, accordingly, reflects all of the contradictions implied by such a setting. Yet Atlanta's Jim Crow legacy is considerably less burdensome than that of its neighbors, a point upon which Michael at Braves & Birds does a superb job expanding upon here and which ESPN utterly ignores here. As televisions exploded with images of church burnings, fire hoses, police dogs and race riots in places like Birmingham, Memphis and Little Rock, Atlanta was busy dubbing itself "The City Too Busy To Hate."

White Southerners are more than a little prickly when it comes to the topic of race in the South, principally because racism didn't begin in the South and, given recent events as recent as those in Idaho, it isn't likely to end there. And yet, to be in such a reputed hotbed of racial hostility, the South's economic nexus, Atlanta, has shown itself to be remarkably inclusive. As Michael notes: "Atlanta's mayors have been African-American since 1974. The district attorney in Atlanta is African-American, as is the chief of police. These seem like fairly relevant facts to me in describing the question of race in Atlanta."

When the Southern Christian Leadership Council initially jumped to the defense of Vick, saying that it would "honor" Vick at its national convention, it was a surreal moment. Had, as Jim Wooten wondered on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's editorial pages, Black America progressed so much since Jim Crow that the biggest problem facing African Americans in 2007 was that a federal dog fighting indictment had been served on a multi-millionaire athlete? Surely not, as State Rep. Tyrone Brooks (D-Atlanta) counseled SCLC President Charles Steele:

"What has he ever done except throw a football, run a football?" Brooks told the AJ-C. "I don't think he has done anything to deserve any special recognition."

There's a refreshing sobriety in Brooks' comment. Maybe, just this once, we can deviate from the standard reflex of foisting the standard storyline of the Plight of Blacks in the South on anything involving blacks and crime. This is, first and foremost (and, I'd argue, exclusively), a story about a multi-millionaire athlete possibly doing something that's a felony in 48 states and at the federal level. As Brooks observed, Vick never carried the flag for the SCLC, so why should the SCLC carry water for Vick? Michael at Braves & Birds is even more direct: "there is a subtle paternalistic prejudice in arguing that African-Americans shouldn't be expected to view the charges against Vick in an analytical manner."

When blacks celebrated O.J. Simpson's "not guilty" verdict, comedian Chris Rock asked with characteristic exasperation, "Why? What did we get?" Similarly, if Vick is exonerated, it won't be a victory for Black America, it'll be yet another victory for the rich, famous and well-lawyered.

What, exactly, is it that you, uh ... do here?

2007-07-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

Gerald Poindexter. I’m naturally suspicious of people named “Poindexter.” Ditto people in bow ties, which, in Gerald’s case, would be an improvement as there can’t be many DAs outside of Hawaii who grace the cameras in Hawaiian shirts. Then again, there can’t be many DAs who can watch agents clear a property of five dozen scarred pit bulls, bloody carpets, modified doggie treadmills, performance-enhancing drugs, something call a “rape stand” and then, when reporters ask whether somebody should be held accountable, reply “For what?”

Michael “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown. Sure, this is an oldie, but when your name shows up in the top Bushism of 2005, immortality is yours. Consider the runners-up:

· "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," Bush said in explaining his communications strategy in May 2005.

· "I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?" Bush asked in a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a U.N. Security Council meeting in September 2005.

· "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table," Bush said in Brussels last February 2005.

· "In terms of timetables, as quickly as possible - whatever that means," the president said of his timeframe for passing Social Security legislation in March 2005.

· "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law," Bush said in describing illegal immigrants in Tucson, Arizona, in November 2005

John Mackey. Like many people, John Mackey likes to post on message boards, blog and generally fart around on the Internet on company time. Unlike many people, John’s day job is chairman and CEO of a publicly traded company. Mackey confirmed last week that he spent eight years posting on Yahoo's financial message boards under the name Rahodeb, an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah. Many of his entries praised his company, Whole Foods, while blasting rivals such as Wild Oats Markets Inc., a company Whole Foods is trying to buy. So, after doing his damnedest screw Wild Oats investors and push down Wild Oats’ stock price in order to make them a more digestible acquisition target, Mackey wound up screwing his own investors by causing Whole Foods' shares to crater as a result.

Texas Barbecue Trail, Dispatch #2: Taylor (Father's Day Edition)

2007-06-17T09:10:00.001-07:00

"Now you're about to see something really special."

Sometimes I make this declaration to anyone sharing the table with me right before I dive into an obscenely overloaded plate of barbecue. It's not that I mean disrespect to what's on my plate by wolfing it down. Rather, I'm describing the exquisite pleasure I'm about to derive from that plate. On some occasions, my ecstasy borders on the pornographic but, if you get too close, you could lose a limb.

Yesterday, I uttered these words while standing in line at Louie Mueller BBQ in Taylor, Texas, well before my plate was even prepared. One of the true Texas barbecue shrines, Louie's was founded in 1946 as a grocery, Louie Mueller's Complete Food Store. After opening a barbecue shed to feed workers from a nearby railroad yard and from area cotton fields, Louie Mueller's opened in its present location at 206 W. 2^nd Street in 1959 in what had been a ladies' basketball court in 1923. The walls and ceiling of the cavernous, dimly lit temple are darkened by years of oak smoke that emanates from the brick oven in the center of the building. There's a corkboard full of business cards that, having never been removed, range from tanned to blackened from the years of smoke. Added in 1999, the screened-in dining area brings some air circulation to the proceedings.

So, indeed, at Louie's, "atmosphere" isn't some frou-frou, ephemeral term with which to describe the indescribable. At Louie's, like Kreuz's Market in Lockhart, you literally breathe it.

Naturally, there's history to along with that atmosphere. Louie's son, Bobby, bought the place out in 1974 and began serving cole slaw and potato salad, which were his mother-in-law's recipes. Bobby has made the hot sausage from scratch since the '60s. Bobby's son, Johnny, brought a taste of Taylor to Austin at the now-closed Johnny Mueller's on Manor Road. From what I've been able to gather, there's been years of bad blood between father and son. While I can't confirm the nature of the dispute, the bottom line has been that loyalty to Bobby versus the convenience of Johnny being in Austin has been a conundrum for barbecue aficionados in Austin. It was bittersweet to discover upon our return to Austin that the issue was rendered moot last year when Johnny's sadly closed.

But back to Louie's. Right out of the gate, I've got a lot of use for a barbecue joint that pours draught Shiner Bock in chilled Mason jars. When I was growing up in Columbus, Ga., on Sundays after church I drank gallons of IBC root beer that Country's Barbecue served in Mason jars. Nostalgia goes well with barbecue.

It should come as no surprise that Louie's serves its meat on butcher paper in the old-school Texas tradition. As was with the case with Johnny, Bobby makes a point of cutting off a piece of brisket for you to sample while he gets your meal ready. As was not the case with Johnny, Bobby spares you the splash of surliness often dished out to unwitting customers on Manor Road.

The clear musts on the menu are the moist brisket and the jalapeno sausage. They've introduced chipotle sausage as well, but I saved that for a return trip. The brisket comes in slices nearly three-quarters of inch thick, featured nearly centimeter-thick smoke rings and, as was the case with Johnny's, practically melted in my mouth, such was the slow-cooked consistency.

Similarly, the tender, fine-ground sausage fell apart as soon as I cut into it. Like the brisket, the sausage was well-marbled and thus drenched in moist, fatty goodness. Per personal custom, I skipped the white bread, which might've been a misstep this time. Owing to the cayenne and jalapeno, Louie's sausage has a long-lasting piquancy that can overshadow your appreciation of the other items on your plate. A splash of iced tea or beer can put some of the fire out, but a little white bread might make a more effective sorbet with which to cleanse the palate. I'm just offering this as a caveat to the taster, not as a criticism of the meat, which, as Gourmet and the James Beard Foundation and others have noted, is exceptional.

I also tried the pork ribs, which, like the brisket, feature Louie's signature rub, a delicious cracked pepper blend that accents the flavor of the meat without overpowering it and seems to hold in the moisture as well. This may be my regional bias rearing its head again, but it seems an unfortunate fact of life with Texas barbecue that, when you order pork ribs, you can expect spare ribs, rather than the loin back ribs, which are prized in Memphis for their fall-off-the-bone tenderness. Spare ribs have more meat per rib, but, in spite of being a fattier cut, lack loin back ribs' tenderness. Additionally, there's a bit more effort required to get all of the meat off. Still, Louie's does a fine job here and the smoky oak flavor, combined with the delicious rub, does plenty to balance any criticisms of texture.

It should be noted that Taylor is also home to the Taylor Café, another historic barbecue establishment, which I'll have to cover in a later dispatch.

By the way, Happy Father's Day. If you live in the same town as your dad, take the ol' man out for some 'cue.

Pit Bull Owners: Off the Chain, Out of the Closet

2007-06-11T17:44:00.001-07:00

As a pit bull owner, I've been watching the Michael Vick pit bull story with great interest, in spite of the utter revulsion I feel towards the alleged activities (I refuse to use the term "sport" to describe dog fighting and defy anyone to justify doing otherwise). Regardless of whether Vick's direct participation is proven, as the owner of the literal killing fields upon which the gruesome felonies apparently were perpetrated, he ought to bear some responsibility. Indeed, according to the article linked above, even the surviving dogs taken from Vick's property on Moonlight Road will have to be euthanized, as animal control officers have determined that these dogs cannot be adopted. If it is proven that Vick actively participated in dog fighting (be it through betting, organizing, financing, training, etc.), I expect to see him in prison stripes before I ever see him in a Falcons jersey. Any other outcome would be a gross miscarriage of justice.

Of course, I realize that coming out against dog fighting is about as bold a stance as opposing child molestation. If the heinousness of such a pursuit isn't immediately obvious to you, your sociopathic tendencies require far more help than this blog can possibly offer. That said, it's probably worth calling out apologists such as ESPN's Scoop Jackson who, on Outside the Lines, attempted to excuse pit bull fighting as "a cultural thing" among blacks. I understand suicide bombing is a cultural thing as well, although I've never heard anyone attempt to justify it along those lines. "Cultural thing" or not, dog fighting is a felony in 48 states and a misdemeanor in the other two and, to my knowledge, it isn't any more legal if the perpetrators happen to be black.

Moving along though ... In part as a result of stories such as this one, the act of coming out in support of pit bulls requires an increasing amount of nerve. Try renting an apartment in any major metro area as a pit bull owner. Picture the change in a co-worker's face during the following exchange:

Co-worker: Hey, what’d you do this weekend?

You: Took the dog for a hike and swim along the Greenbelt.

Co-worker: Ah, cool. What kind of dog do you have?

You: A pit bull.

Granted, owning a pit bull is a lifestyle choice you make knowing the good and bad that comes with it. It's not like pit bull owners were born a disenfranchised minority with no say in the matter, like, say, blacks in the Jim Crow South. We could've saved ourselves some headaches by being golden retriever owners.

So why do we bother? In part, because of stories such as Vick's, not in spite of them. With every story of dog fighting or of a pit bull attack, a negative stereotype is further cemented in the public's mind about the breed. But to punish the breed would be to treat the symptom rather than address the cause, like banning the Internet because it's been a tool for identity theft. In this case, the cause is, invariably, cruel and/or neglectful owners. There is a place in this world for pit bulls: in the care of committed, loving pet owners. So being a responsible pit bull owner is a lifestyle choice, yes, but, with politicians clamoring for outright bans of the breed and the media using the acts of an irresponsible few to demonize the rest of us, it's increasingly a cause.

While I'm not starting any rallies for pit bulls, I am being more open about my dog's breed in hopes of broadening people's perspective on the subject. In the past, when a child at the park was playing with my dog, I was inclined to fib a little to the parents, not wanting to cause concern or spoil the goodwill that Goya was building with their child. I'd explain that my dog was a "terrier mix," a "Staffordshire terrier," or a "bull terrier – you know, like Spuds McKenzie, the Bud Light dog."

But I realized that I'm not doing anyone any favors – not to Goya, to pit bulls or to a potential voter. It's good for all three if I'm honest: Goya gets to be the ambassador that she ought to be (and that pit bulls and their owners need her to be), the breed gets some much-needed positive exposure and the parents get to see why pit bulls were once called "nurse maid dogs," due to their unusual tolerance around even the most rambunctious children. Over half a century ago, the pit bull was the RCA/Victor mascot, "Petey" from the Little Rascals, and the Buster Brown mascot. Today, sadly, the only thing you can sell with a pit bull is gangsta rap.

Anecdotally, the pit bull breed is rapidly increasing in popularity and, unfortunately, you can confirm this in part by visiting any animal shelter and noting the number of pit bull mixes hoping for adoption and likely facing euthanasia. For many pit bull owners, that tragic fact alone more than justifies any societal hassles. It's a breed that requires and rewards an extraordinary amount of care and training. Unfortunately, the market for pit bulls includes an inordinate percentage of would-be owners incapable of such attention, which is why so many pit bulls find themselves languishing in shelters. First-time dog owners would be well-advised to consider a less demanding breed. If you've got some feelings of inadequacy that you hope to rectify by acquiring an aggressive dog, do us all a favor and spend the money on a therapist instead.

It's true that, over the years, pit bulls were bred for aggressive activities such as boar-hunting and, yes, dog-fighting. But aggression is not their only trait. They are remarkably playful, loyal, intelligent and dedicated. If there's one thing they all can be counted on to be aggressive about, it's their affection towards humans. The greeting I get when I come home from work is a 15-minute onslaught of kisses. Contrary to the ticking time bomb reputation with which stories such as the Vick case have saddled them, they are renowned for their friendly temperament. The American Temperament Test Society provides temperament testing around the country for dog breeds, and gives a passing score for the entire breed based on the percentage of passed over failed within total number of the particular breed tested. As of December 2003, the American Pit Bull Terrier has a current passing rate of 83.9%, and the American Staffordshire Terrier passes at 83.2%. In comparison, the Golden Retriever passing rate is 83.2%.

The preceding statistics come courtesy of ATL King Pits, a breeder operated by senior University of Georgia wide receiver Sean Bailey, who appears to be bucking another ugly stereotype: the disturbing trend of athlete involvement in pit bull fighting. Bailey claims to have bred out of his blue pit bulls the "gameness" that dog fighters prize. ATL King Pits' articles section is full of useful tips, facts and suggestions about the breed and does much to dispel some unfortunate myths that burden so many pit bull owners.

EDIT: Hat tip to Nicki over in God's Country. We got a posse!

While I Was Away, or A Time to Hustle and A Time to Flow

2007-06-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

Blogging, like most addictions, doesn't pay for itself. It's hard work keeping that monkey fed. And for "between jobs," "independent consultant" types such as yours truly, occasional desperate measures -- such as a temporary shelving of The Habit -- are necessary.

That said, having resumed full-time employment and already returned from vacation, I'm pleased to report that, gentlemen, the bar is officially open!

I expect to make up for lost time shortly, although likely this means more hustling and less flowing, as the summer doesn't offer a wealth of material for college football blogging, other than snarkitude regarding the crimes and misdemeanors our team's 18-22-year-old indentured mercenaries, a topic more than capably documented on Orson Swindle's Fulmer Cup.

Also, a word about the Hoooka player below: Much to my irritation, there is no auto-disable function on the player, which means the preview for Before the Music Dies launches every time you load this page. And it means every time I post, that player goes further down the page and thus gets incrementally harder to find and pause. I've been exchanging e-mails with Indie911 about this and they haven't evidenced much of a sense of urgency on the matter. Likely what I'll do is move the player to my old blog, http://tommy-perkins.blogspot.com, and link it from here. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Anyway, thanks for your patience.

Cheers,

Tommy

What's (really) Killing Music

2007-04-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

As with most things, I'm a little overdue on this, but I'd like to spotlight Austin filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen, whose film Before the Music Dies goes beyond facile demonization of downloaders to explore the real sources of malaise in the music industry, which include radio consolidation, mass popstar production, the death-by-Wal-Mart of the traditional record store and more. Today, courtesy of online social network and music store indie911 and B-Side Entertainment, the film's distributor, the full movie is available for download, blessedly sans DRM for $9.99 in hi-res or $3.99 in lo-res. Thanks to the viral marketing efforts of B-Side and indie911, I'm hosting it right here on Apropos de Nada and if you're interested in doing something similar on your site, go here.

Edit: I had to move the player here, as I have no way of keeping it from automatically launching every time you load this page.

Courtesy of some clips that the filmmakers have shared on YouTube, here's a taste of their excellent work:

First, the teaser:

Second, the Clear Channel effect:

Third, how to create a sexy popstar:

There are a few more clips here, but film is well worth seeing in its entirety.

News and Notes

2007-04-04T10:05:00.001-07:00

150 days until football season. Basically, we have the spring games and then things get really bleak. To tide us over in advance of some final football thoughts, here's a few random thoughts on the week's events so far:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran will release the 15 detained British sailors and marines "as a gift to the British people." In other news, I'm off to rob Goodwill, but rest assured I'll return the loot in a few weeks as a gift and, yes, I will be seeking a deduction next April 15. While the U.S. is not yet at war with Iran, apparently the race is on between our leaders to who can be the smuggest SOB alive not named Trump. Ahmadeinejad jumped out to a big lead this week, magnanimously asking British PM Tony Blair not to "punish" the crew for confessing they had been in Iranian waters when they were seized by Iranian coast guard. To make sure its stick landed squarely in Britain's eye, Iran broadcast videotaped confessions by crew members. (Image at right: Ahmadinejad, apparently in his hostage-taking salad days during the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.)

Keith Richards may or may not have snorted his dad's ashes. If it's true, the only thing surprising about this is that it wasn't Ozzy Osbourne. But Keef has gotta make anyone's short list of people who would do this kind of thing. That list would also include Lemmy Kilmister.

The NCAAs are over, but Billy Packer won't go quietly. Appearing on the Charlie Rose Show, CBS men's hoops color man/lightning rod for scorn, ridicule and hate! hate! hate!, Billy Packer, whose name is Packer, tells Rose, "you always fag out," in response to Rose's mock offer to help him out during the tournament. Consensus is that Packer was not using British slang for cigarettes, because a) Packer is not British and b) "you always cigarette out" makes absolutely no sense. Really, I thought the "Henderson was not looking for a cheap shot" call of the Tyler Hansbrough mugging was going to be Packer's nadir this season, although his insistence on mispronouncing Florida coach Billy Donovan's name ("Dunnavan") during the entire NCAA championship game has to make the season's top 10. Damn you, Packer, the whole point of this post was to see if I could make it through the day without mentioning the Gators.

EMI will be selling high-bitrate, DRM-free downloads through iTunes for $1.30 apiece. The chorus of DRM haters ought to include anyone with more than a two-digit IQ, which apparently excludes most major label executives. EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli, whom I took to task over a year ago, has finally acknowledged a least a small portion of the insanity that is Digital Rights Management. To recap, the lack of interoperability has inhibited digital music sales growth while CD sales continue to falter and placed content owners (the labels) squarely under the thumb of Apple's near-monopoly. Moreover, DRM means limiting consumer options, as in the number of devices on which a consumer can play a track and how many times he/she can copy it. Options have value, which is why we have the Black-Scholes Model. Apparently, EMI and Apple think options in the digital music realm are worth 30 cents a track, as the DRM-free tracks will be priced at $1.30. Lifting DRM restrictions eases some of the pains I mentioned, although these tracks, which are encoded at 256 kbps, will be initially available exclusively though … iTunes. EMI stressed that DRM would remain on music bought under monthly flat-fee-based services such as Rhapsody, Napster and Yahoo Music Unlimited. Oh, well. Baby steps.

The Morning After

2007-04-03T08:59:00.001-07:00

It wasn't the end of the world and while I don't feel fine, God knows I've felt worse (see Auburn in Athens, 1999). Such is fandom that the arbitrary outcome of a ballgame can serve as empirical evidence that God is still very much the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament with a specific mad-on for your team and its followers. Sometimes, I swear that I peaked emotionally at age 12.

Obviously, last night has little to nothing to do with my team, so best to let the Gators have their day. In an era in which the NBA scoops up so many freshmen and high school seniors, it's a pretty special moment in college hoops when that the same starting five can repeat as champs. Pity that it was the Gators who delivered this piece of history, but a begrudging "congratulations" to them all the same.

Anyway, given the generous attention given to yesterday's post by Kyle at Dawgsports and Blutarsky at Get the Picture, and in the comments from Paul Westerdawg of the Georgia Sports Blog, I probably should clarify my stance on the Gators.

I don't think the Gators are the USC of the SEC or its "undisputed alpha." At least, not yet. Given the momentum and resources they've amassed and their investment going forward, I think they're a threat to take that mantle. That's why I used terms like "menace" and "danger," as in, the Germans were a "threat," "menace" and "danger" to placing Europe under their collective boot heel, although history records a different outcome. I hope that those who made it to the bottom of yesterday's admittedly long-winded fretting found evidence that Georgia (and several other SEC teams, for that matter) are eminently capable of blunting Florida's advance.

Also, I should probably clarify the comparison with USC. In terms of athletic tradition, USC towers over Florida like a skyscraper over an ant. I don't mean this as a dig at Florida, but as an only slightly hyperbolic statement of what even many Florida fans would concede. That said, I think tradition is grossly overrated. It helps up to a point, and then, as fan expectations become a program's albatross, it hurts. Tradition is why Alabama is paying $4M a year for a football coach and why Kentucky will probably pay something similar for a basketball coach.

Rather, my comparison has to do with the here and now. There is an undeniable aura of success around USC and Florida, although as Kyle notes, "the Big Lizards' multi-sport dominance over division rival Georgia generally has been by the slimmest of margins, coming in extra innings, by decimal places, and on fortuitous fumbles." Regarding football specifically, I share Blutarsky's belief that too much is being made of Florida's offensive scheme, which scored an average of 22.25 points a game against an SEC slate and which needed a defensive touchdown and a dubious facemask penalty to hold off the worst Georgia squad in perhaps a decade. Yet winning ugly is still winning.

Kyle also notes how the pendulum swings in any competitive rivalry and how, in sports, today's genius is tomorrow's knuckle-dragger and vice-versa. Prior to running roughshod over the SEC in 2004, Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville was an illicit plane ride away from being dumped for then-Louisville coach (and former Tuberville assistant) Bobby Petrino. When Ron Zook was the Gators' football coach, the second least popular person in Gainesville was the man who hired him, UF AD Jeremy Foley, whom ESPN's Pat Forde anointed on Sunday "the hottest athletic director in history." In Oklahoma, Bob Stoops regularly crossed the Red River to hang as much as 65 points on Texas in Dallas. In the past three Red River Shootouts, the Sooners' combined offensive output is slightly more than half 2003's grim total.

Personally, I don't think either Tuberville or Foley are idiots or savants. They're smart guys who survived some bad decisions. Foley's athletic department has won 16 of 19 SEC All-Sports trophies and has finished in the top 10 nationally every year since 1984. Lucky, he is not. If he ever leaves Gainesville, I will be shocked if it is on anything but his own accord. But as long as Bobby Lowder draws breath, I'll make no predictions for Tuberville.

Regardless, Foley's achievement did not occur overnight. He began as an intern in the UF AD in 1976 and took over as director exactly 15 years ago, when current Georgia AD Damon Evans, now 36, was still getting his bachelor's in finance. Foley had the incredibly good fortune of taking the reigns after Steve Spurrier lead the Gators to their first SEC championship, which revived a long-dormant program and presumably made Foley's job as a fund-raiser considerably easier. And, after losing Spurrier to the NFL in 2001, Foley nearly squandered all of that momentum with the near-disastrous hiring of Ron Zook and his failure to bring Spurrier back to Gainesville when The Visor came calling. Ok, so maybe he's a little lucky.

Evans, on the other hand, all he's done since taking over in 2004 is preside over a dozen SEC championships and seven national championships. He has also brought Georgia athletics into the modern age of sports business, setting fund-raising and logo licensing revenue records, doubling sponsorship revenue and breaking ground on a $30M gymnastics practice facility and a $30M basketball practice facility. And, yes, it helped that Mark Richt had revived Georgia football, whose profits fund half of Evans' budget. Still, if someone is going to take Foley's mantle, my money's on Evans.

The Gathering Gator Storm

2007-04-02T11:09:00.001-07:00

Largely on the strength of his six-volume account of World War II, Winston Churchill won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. The first volume of his account, The Gathering Storm, is a day-to-day account of Hitler's unfolding menace and the failures of appeasement attempts by European leaders. In no way do I liken the University of Florida or athletic teams to the Nazis (but to the Taliban? Sure, why not.). Nevertheless, as a fan of a rival program, I am alarmed at the Gators' sudden dominance of the major revenue and non-revenue varsity sports and I consider their sweep of the SEC landscape analogous to Germany's steamrolling of Europe in the 1930s.

Some will argue that Florida's emergence will benefit the entire SEC, as the national exposure and television and bowl riches will trickle down to the rest of us. It's true that, over the past two decades of Gator dominance, the SEC has run circles around the rest of the country in the race for bowl and television revenue. Roughly half of the conference finished in the AP final top 25 football rankings. Competition breeds competition and the Gators' rising tide has lifted the rest of the SEC's boats. But, rest assured, that wealth will hardly be spread evenly.

I contend that the SEC is in danger of becoming the Pac-10, with Florida playing the role of USC as the conference's undisputed alpha. If you're an SEC fan (or, heaven forbid, an SEC athletics administrator) untroubled by Florida's rise, you're not paying attention. More troubling to me is that Georgia, which is well-equipped to turn back this tide, has instead allowed it to gather volume. For evidence, look no further than this season, when the Gators completed a sweep of Georgia in football, men's basketball, baseball and freaking gymnastics, which, during my time as a student during the Ray Goff era, was the only source of consolation for Bulldogs sports fans.

Today, the Florida men's basketball team stands on the cusp of repeating as NCAA champs. If they do so, they will become the first team to do so since Duke did it in 1991 and 1992. This marks a major change in the landscape. If we were talking about UCLA, Kentucky, Indiana, UNC or any other traditional basketball heavyweight, we could remain content that the status quo remains unchecked. But this Florida. Prior to losing in the second round of the 1987 NCAAs, Florida had never been to the Big Dance. Of Florida's 10 NCAA tournament appearances and two final four appearances, half occurred under current coach Bill Donovan, who is in his 10^th season in Gainesville. Florida's emergence as a basketball power is as sudden and out-of-nowhere as was Miami's arrival as a football power in 1983.

While we're on the subject of football, consider that prior to Steve Spurrier's arrival in 1990, Florida went some six decades without a football title of any kind – conference or national. Since then, they've amassed seven SEC titles and two national championships.

As Pat Forde notes, we have entered the mega-program era, in which the demarcation between "football school" and "basketball school" is being replaced by the simple distinction of "haves" and "have-nots." Per the Indianapolis Star's NCAA Financial Reports Database, the University of Florida's athletic department operates on a $77.7M budget and spends all but $3.8M of that. Ohio State's AD budget is $89.7M (Forde says it's $102M, but he doesn't cite a source), with but $120,674 unallocated. Georgia's AD budget is comparable, sporting $68.8M in revenues and, much to my consternation, leading the country with nearly $24 million in unallocated funds. So while Georgia's budget is comparable to Florida's, our spending is not.

"Advertising and sponsorships," which includes merchandise royalties, brings in $6.7M to UF's AD, which is a little over 60% of what a season's worth of ticket sales at 88,548-seat Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Given the glut of Gator gear that presumably would fly off the racks with another Gator championship, we can safely assume that Florida, which leads the SEC in royalties, will extend its lead significantly.

As Forde notes, "Six members of this year's Sweet 16 traditionally have been football-first schools: Florida, Ohio State, USC, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Oregon. Thirteen schools that advanced to the round of 32 in this tournament have played in at least one BCS bowl game this century."

Florida and Ohio State, as you will recall, just finished competing for a BCS championship in football. The cash flow that leads to this kind of preeminence is not hard to diagram. Football produced over $26M in profits for Ohio State and $27.1M for Florida. Men's basketball delivered $7.4M for Ohio State and nearly $1.9M for Florida. If football profits are driving the bus – and it appears abundantly clear that they do – then this is clearly a game Georgia can play. Football profits at Georgia totaled $38.4M, nearly $10M more than the SEC's second-most profitable team, Alabama.

Most Profitable Football Programs - SEC		Most Profitable Football Programs - National
1. University of Georgia	$38,363,343	1. University of Texas	$39,294,908
2. University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa	$28,803,845	2. University of Georgia	$38,363,343
3. Louisiana State University	$27,932,154	3. University of Michigan	$35,705,233
4. University of Florida	$27,172,983	4. University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa	$28,803,845
5. Auburn University	$24,184,850	5. Louisiana State University	$27,932,154
6. University of Arkansas	$16,088,700	6. University of Florida	$27,172,983
7. University of Tennessee	$15,739,864	7. Ohio State University	$26,099,129
8. University of Kentucky	$12,161,465	8. Texas A&M University	$24,975,623
9. University of Mississippi	$8,693,607	9. Auburn University	$24,184,850
10. University of South Carolina	$7,120,545	10. University of Arkansas	$16,088,700
11. Mississippi State University	$2,694,966	11. University of Tennessee	$15,739,864

As I have said before it is time for Georgia's athletic director Damon Evans to spend. Spend wisely, but spend. When it comes to total facilities and maintenance spending, Georgia ranks 48^th nationally and last in the SEC. Aside from the nation's loveliest football setting, an excellent baseball park and a new basketball practice facility, Georgia has very little to show in facilities spending. Nowhere is this negligence more glaring than at Georgia's basketball facility, Stegeman Coliseum, dubbed "the Stegasaurus," for its Jurassic-era design. (EDIT: Per Paul Westerdawg's comments below, the Georgia AD carries roughly $100M in debt related to facilities upgrades. It's an accounting issue, but apparently, the Indy Star's database doesn't count debt service towards facilities and maintenance spending.)

We've held our own in salaries, ranking 13^th nationally and 4^th in the SEC. And I'm on board with the recent decision to extend men's basketball coach Dennis Felton's contract. As Paul Westerdawg notes, there's been noticeable progress from the crater in which the Harricks left Georgia men's hoops and we need stability in the program for recruiting reasons and for a host of other reasons as well. The loss of Tubby Smith to Kentucky, coupled with the subsequent Harrick era, set Georgia men's hoops back well over a decade. A decade ago, Georgia men were in the Sweet 16. This year, we were routed in the second round of the NIT. I strongly encourage Evans to not allow the new practice facility to be the end of Georgia's hoops commitment.

If there's a positive in all of this, it's that Florida has proven conclusively that, with the right funding and management, a Johnny-come-lately can come in and dominate any sport in this new era of mega-programs. But soon, as the rich continue to get richer, that won't always be the case. Right now, Florida may resemble USC. Left unchecked for another couple of years, they'll resemble a better-managed version of the New York Yankees. Regardless of whether Florida wins or loses tonight – but particularly if they win – I hope someone in the Butts-Mehre building responds with a Churchillian sense of urgency.

Hybrids Approach Parity

2007-03-29T09:54:00.001-07:00

John Gartner reports in today's "Autopia" blog on Wired that hybrids could become a good buy for consumers in the next two years, thanks to innovations in lithium ion batteries. These batteries are 35 percent lighter and 55 percent smaller than nickel metal hydride batteries, and enable vehicle manufacturers to cut the price delta by half. Granted, this post was prompted by a bit of shilling on the part of Charles Gassenheimer, the Vice Chairman of Ener1 Inc., which develops lithium ion batteries.

Even still, this topic has been of immense interest to me and anyone else who'd like to see consumers, the economy and the environment all get out from under the thumb of Big Oil. In business school, we spent a lot of time on cases involving alternative energy startups and the product roadmap for hybrid and other low-consumption vehicles. While many of us argued the point that we'd rather pay a premium to Toyota or Honda than to Exxon, ultimately, we came back to the sad conclusion that consumers will always vote with their wallets.

After grinding a few of the data points in Gartner's post, I've found there's reason to be more optimistic. Currently, car buyers pay a $4,000 premium for a hybrid car over the equivalent gas car. Assuming the average motorist drives 12,000 miles a year and pays the current average fuel cost of $2.581 a gallon, it would take nearly six and a half years for the fuel savings to catch up with the premium one pays for a hybrid car. Given that most people sell their cars after five years, there's not a strong financial value proposition for hybrid cars currently. These are my calcs:

	Hybrid	Regular
Mileage	50	25
Premium	$4,000.00	$0.00
Miles/Year	12,000	12,000
Gallons purchased	240	480
Fuel cost	$2.58	$2.58
Annual fuel cost	$619.44	$1,238.88
Years to break even	6.46	6.46
Total Fuel Cost + Premium	$8,000.00	$8,000.00

But, if Gassenheimer's prediction holds true, hybrid car buyers would need less than three years and three months to break even. That's well within the five-year window in which most people keep new cars and thus shows a very reasonable financial value prop. Of course, true finance geeks will haggle about time value of money, but since you'd have to apply that to both the up-front cost of a hybrid and the added fuel costs of a gas car, I think it comes close to being a wash.

	Hybrid	Regular
Mileage	50	25
Premium	$2,000.00	$0.00
Miles/Year	12,000	12,000
Gallons purchased	240	480
Fuel cost	$2.58	$2.58
Annual fuel cost	$619.44	$1,238.88
Years to break even	3.23	3.23
Total Fuel Cost + Premium	$4,000.00	$4,000.00

Friday Breakfast Taco

2007-03-23T09:22:00.001-07:00

Today's breakfast taco is brought to you by Juanita's, the little red caboose on 5^th. The egg and chorizo is solid and the salsa verde is among my favorites in Austin.

Soundtrack: I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll, by Mississippi Fred McDowell. North Mississippi Hill Country Blues earliest exponent plugs in electric for the first time and features a rhythm section comprising more than his foot and right hand (it's some dude with brushes barely audible in the background). As the title indicates, this ain't no sell-out. Aside from a little amplification, it's the same straight, rhythmic, droning deep blues McDowell had been playing since the '20s (although that's a matter of faith, as it wasn't until 1959 when folklorist Alan Lomax became the first to capture McDowell on tape). The Stones turned in very faithful cover of "You Got to Move" on Sticky Fingers. The album also features a rollicking "Jesus is on the Mainline" and a jagged, slashing "61 Highway." McDowell died two years after this album's release (1969) of cancer.

Vote Different: Several versions of the mash-up of Apple's 1984 Super Bowl ad attacking Hilary Clinton are circulating on YouTube. Per Wired, the original is the product of Phillip de Vellis, an employee of Blue State Digital, a political technology consulting firm whose clients include Democrats Barack Obama, Bill Richardson and Tom Vilsack. De Vellis revealed himself in the Huffington Post, noting that he supports Obama's presidential candidacy, but that he made the video independent of his employer, "on a Sunday afternoon in my apartment using my personal equipment (a Mac and some software)" and then uploaded it to YouTube and e-mailed links to blogs. Accounts differ whether de Vellis was fired or resigned, but, either way, he's no longer with Blue State Digital.

The message was brilliantly executed: Clinton gives her candidacy speech from a giant telescreen from George Orwell's novel 1984, promising to "let the conversation begin," a conversation that de Vellis apparently believes is really a monologue.

At issue is whether the Federal Election Commission should be monitoring this kind of activity, to see whether large corporations, unions and other groups are unfairly influencing elections by bankrolling viral Internet campaigns – basically, creating an online wave of Swiftboat-esque campaigns. When you think ahead to what well-funded ad agencies, cashing checks from the RNC or DNC, could do with this medium, I suppose regulation of the public airwaves could resemble deck chair arrangement on the Titanic. That said, the Internet is not a public commons, like the airways, so you have to factor in free speech considerations.

Still, I think the other takeaway here is how easy this apparently was and what a landmark moment this may well have been for social media and user generated content. I'm guessing de Vellis didn't get any clearances from Apple to use the original 1984-themed Super Bowl ad. He just grabbed some content that was freely available on YouTube and spliced it up to suit his own purposes. Clearly, he didn't need a Madison Avenue budget and Big Oil dollars to pull this off; all it cost him was a few hours of his weekend. Contrast that with Swiftboat, which was a massively coordinated campaign that entailed a lot of pricey media buying.

Granted, this wasn't a true populist uprising, as de Vellis is – or was – a part of the political machine when he produced "Vote Different." But this could have just as easily been done by someone outside of the political machine. De Vellis made an eloquent statement about how, using a few free online tools (and with a cavalier attitude about copyright), anyone – not just a Karl Rove-esque Svengali – can reshape the "conversation" Ms. Clinton, like everyone else in our two-party charade of a democracy, had expected to control.

Oh, yeah: I'm way, way, waaaay overdue on this, but I want to share my appreciation for some recent hat tips from T. Kyle King at Dawgsports and Senator Blutarsky at Get the Picture. Both of these guys do phenomenal jobs covering college sports from a Dawg's-eye view, delivering thoughtful analysis wrapped in clever, incisive writing that invariably rewards a visit several times over. And, particularly with the addition of MaconDawg over at Dawgsports, they're prolific enough to keep your RSS reader busy all day. Gents, if you want to use that as testimonial, have at it -- it applies equally and fully to all parties. Thanks again for directing a portion of your well-deserved traffic to my dark corner.

Texas Barbecue Trail, Dispatch #1: Elgin

2007-03-19T14:54:00.001-07:00

As part of Apropos de Nada's continuing efforts to defy categorization, to mess with and, ultimately, re-embrace Texas, to stave off the imminent post-March Madness and pre-kickoff doldrums and, lastly, to undo whatever good is being done with the new gym membership, the crack staff at AdN has endeavored to canvass the Texas Barbecue Trail. Slow-cooked meat is one of the few subjects about which we're qualified to comment at length, having resided in barbecue Meccas such as Memphis, Georgia and both Carolinas and having competed in the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest.

It's only fair at this, the outset, to warn our readership across the Mississippi River: this will involve beef. The Southeastern visitor will note with a mixture of derision, befuddlement and sadness that Texans include beef in their otherwise delicious barbecue cornucopia, which also features chicken and turkey. In the South, inviting someone to barbecue that includes any kind of meet besides pork is akin to inviting them to a satanic orgy. As for Texas' take, well, beef comes from cows, which are, um, plentiful in Texas. Dance with them what brung ya.

Having previewed Lockhart rather aggressively before our departure to barbecue oblivion, aka California, AdN pre-loosened its belt and picked as its first stop Elgin, home to the Southside Market & BBQ Inc. and to Meyer's Elgin Smokehouse. Famous for its hot sausage, Elgin is a tiny hamlet roughly 30 miles northeast of Austin on Highway 290.

The first stop was the Southside Market, which was founded in 1882 and has been in the same hands since Ernest Bracewell took over in 1968 after moving from San Antonio. As with most Texas barbecue establishments, you can buy your meal buy the pound and eat it off of butcher paper. For the dandies among us, you can also order a plate for lunch.

Oscar Wilde, clearly with barbecue on the brain, famously averred that "Nothing exceeds like excess." Thus, we ordered up the four-meat combo, which featured sausage, brisket and ribs of the pork and beef variety.

As a native Georgian, I share my home region's wariness of brisket, a lower-quality cut of beef. And bad brisket is about as appealing as shoe leather. Fortunately, Southside shares the conviction held by the sorely missed John Mueller, who smoked his brisket until it was of near-liquid consistency. The same could be said of Southside's cuts, which, as tired as I am of this cliché, melted in my mouth. The all-beef sausage, too, was superb. While it lacked the almost explosive juiciness of Smitty's in Lockhart, the hallmark piquancy more than compensated.

I am always frustrated by the beef rib. Sure, it's huge. It's also a lot of work and it rewards that work with poor-quality meet and relatively little of it. I dunno, maybe I'm getting bad cuts, but my Southside experience was no different. You spend a lot of time gnawing off small chunks of meat off this Flintstones-sized bone and get very little out of it, besides a lot of grease on your face. Contrast that with the Memphis-style baby back pork rib, which is of manageable size and the sheath of meat slides off the bone like silk. Southside's pork rib was a better experience, primarily because it's pork and pork ribs are proof that our God is a loving one. The fat seems to be marbled better on pork ribs than on beef ribs and the meat is much more tender, so you get a much more buttery experience.

Sauce, in my experience, seems to be something of an afterthought in Texas. Primarily, this is because the effort is directed towards the rub and the smoking. If you've done that part right, the logic goes, why cover it up with sauce? Fair enough. Also, unlike the Southeast, there's not a real regional bias toward vinegar, tomato or mustard. At the Salt Lick and at County Line, you get a viscous, sweet syrup that I recommend avoiding. Southside serves a peppery vinegar sauce that aficionados of South Georgia and Eastern North Carolina barbecue would feel right at home with.

Southside's sides – cole slaw and beans – were serviceable. Sides aren't what I come for, but these didn't detract and that's the most verbose you can expect me to be on this matter.

The next stop was Meyer's, founded in 1949 by R.G. Meyer and, before you consider me inhuman, this was a "to go" purchase. I finished this meal today for lunch at my desk and, due to having had to re-heat the meal in an oven, I'm can't claim to having been equitable to Meyer's, where I ordered a three-meat combo. That said, perhaps due to the extra baking, I found their pork ribs to be exceptionally tender, whereas the sausage, a pork and beef combo, was perhaps toughened by the baking. The brisket was a little tougher, too. Some of that can be blamed on re-heating, but I just didn't see the balanced fat distribution in their brisket that Southside's well-marbled cuts had. The sauce seemed a little sweeter, but featured the same vinegar base as Southside.

At first blush, I have to give the edge to Southside over Meyer's, but I say that with the caveat that I owe Meyer's a fresh shot at a later date.

Iraq War, Year Four

2007-03-18T09:37:00.001-07:00

So this morning I got up to watch Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on CBS' Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Not having seen Gates discuss the war before, I found him to be a refreshing about-face from Donald Rumsfeld. In place of Rumsfeld's confrontational tone and Clintonian parsing, Gates offered a thoughtful, quiet directness in discussing the fourth anniversary of the Iraq invasion and the addition of nearly 30,000 new US troops in Iraq.

Schieffer asked Gates about President Bush's observation that withdrawing from Iraq would only motivate Al Qaeda to follow the troops elsewhere, i.e., advance on a retreating enemy. Schieffer's point was that Iraq is a civil war and why would a civil war leave the country in which it is being waged? Gates response (and I'm paraphrasing) was that "this isn't a bunch of Sunnis and Shi'a falling in on one another," but rather a bunch of organized hit squads hitting targeted spots. In other words, there is still a method to this madness, a centralized source orchestrating this chaos for its own purposes. For once, the debate of whether what's going on in Iraq is a civil war seemed like something other than a semantic debate to me.

It's a fair question: Would withdrawal be construed by Al Qaeda and its affiliated militias as retreat and, more importantly, would they follow us to another theatre, such as Iran, Indonesia, Afghanistan or the US? If I recall Sun Tzu's The Art of War correctly, it seems that you'd want to direct your attacks where your enemy's troops are the least concentrated, as Al Qaeda did on 9/11. It doesn't seem likely that Al Qaeda would allow US, through its troop movements, dictate where and when the war will be fought.

As this war has rolled on, I admit to having rationalized it a number of ways. Not because I'm any kind of Bush apologist, but merely because it's happening regardless and to counter a few of my countless criticisms of it. When it was first launched, I didn't have high hopes that we would find WMDs and wasn't particularly concerned about that issue, since 250,000 dead Kurds sure sounded like mass destruction to me. Mostly, I looked at it as unfinished business from the first Persian Gulf War, which I believed should have been concluded with a US push to Baghdad and the removal of Saddam then. I realize that, given Bush 41's affinity for international consensus, why he eschewed that option and I also know now that such a move would have put us in the same situation then that we're in now.

Since then, I've thought that, if we must be at war with Al Qaeda, and, given Al Qaeda's unambiguous insistence that we must, I'd rather stage that war anywhere – Iraq, Iran … hell, Antarctica – than on US soil.

The flipside of that perspective has to do with the nature of this war, specifically, measuring success. For the moment, forget "winning" in the traditional sense. It's not as if Al Qaeda and its affiliated militias in Iraq are nation-states with civilians who have an exhaustible appetite for war. Al Qaeda is a relatively decentralized terrorist network of disaffected Muslim extremists who became sufficiently disgusted with US hegemony in their homeland to be willing to complete kamikaze missions at Al Qaeda's behest. By its very constitution, all of Al Qaeda's members can bear the cost of war. So the question becomes: Is our work in Iraq blunting Al Qaeda's ability and willingness to wage war? If anything, it seems clear that our actions in Iraq are having a multiplier effect on those sympathetic to Al Qaeda and its affiliated militias.

What's also troubling is the possibility that we've created a welfare state in Iraq. The US has spent countless man-hours training hundreds of thousands of Iraqi security personnel and yet we're doubling down on our presence in Iraq. In business terms, this resembles chasing good money with bad. It's hard not to conclude that we're playing into our enemy's hands by being a full-time nanny (and inadvertent Al Qaeda recruiter) in Iraq while Al Qaeda regroups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and while it opens up a new theatre of war in Southeast Asia.

Friday Breakfast Taco

2007-03-16T10:35:00.001-07:00

Today's breakfast taco is brought to you by Maria's Taco X-Press, where the migas chorizo taco ought to come with a lifetime supply of Metamucil and a coupon for a colonoscopy, but doesn't.

So it is a sunny Friday in March and anyone in Austin not playing hooky is presumably already unemployed. During Lent season, March Madness, SXSW and St. Patty's Day preparation are the March trinity of slackerdom in a city that, having been where the original Slacker was filmed, is a qualified expert on the matter.

So, with my apologies for being so late in posting, here is today's guide on where to get your slack on in the ATX. Those chained to their cubicles probably already know about this, but if not, CBS is streaming March Madness live here. I found out about this late and am currently #8,753 in waiting to get admission. Yay, streaming video!

Regardless, your SXSW plat du jour:

For my money, which is couch change, the parties are the way to rock econo. Pretty much any band you'd want to see in the evening is playing for free during the day and, as often as not, you don't need a pass, RSVP or anything else to get in on some free beer and music. This tidbit was not lost on a few homeless types, who made it into the IODA showcase and helped themselves to some free tamales, quesadillas and Tecate.

Of the parties, my recommendations are:

The Jane Magazine party on 401 Guadalupe, which will feature Sloan, who are great, have been around forever and yet never get their due, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that they're from someplace like Labrador or Newfoundland. Edit: Dang! Just noticed that this is invite only.

Sinister Records, The TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls and OmniRox Entertainment are throwing down at Momo's on 6^th. On tap are several bands I've never heard of and, more importantly, the chance to "meet and hang out with your favorite TXRD Lonestar Rollergirl." Sold!

Texas Roller Derby: Feel the love.

Four blocks west on 6^th, at Friends, the Berklee College of Music presents Heavy Rotation Records release party for Dorm Sessions IV with Kid:Nap:Kin and Madi Diaz (as seen in the film Rock School) and the Pete Townshend Rewind, which features "rock, rap, folk, and jazz alumni re-arranging and windmilling through Townsend and Who album cuts and classics." Performers include Melissa Ferrick, the Scot Amendola Band, Amanda Mosher, Cassavettes, Death Ships, Steve Dawson, When Girls Collide, Stephanie Delk, Sarah Sharp, Audible Mainframe, and more.

The Aussies usually thrown a quality SXSW and this year's edition sounds promising: at Brush Square Park, the Australian Music Collective ("the engine driving Australian music to the world") will feature I Heart Hiroshima, Panda Band, Dallas Crane, Children Collide, Expatriate, Hoodoo Gurus, You Am I, Airbourne, Wolf & Cub, Spod, and Beasts Of Bourbon. Dallas Crane cameo'd Wednesday at a party at the Scoot Inn on the east side and, in spite of it being an impromptu performance with someone else's instruments, they killed. Hoodoo Gurus are a sentimental favorite from my days as a junior-high alt-rock geek in the late '80s. Show me some emotion, bitches!

A Clueless Outsider’s Guide to SXSW, pt. duh

2007-03-13T12:32:00.001-07:00

Zounds! Two days, two posts. I'm bordering on the prolific here, although that border is still an ocean. Anyway, rock 'n' roll and a ravenous – albeit minute – readership demand more guidance on where to its wrists stamped at South By Southwest. With Wednesday's SXSW installment in the can, onward to Thursday's meager-by-comparison South By shenanigans.

The Austin Music Hall brings a triple dose of Alejandro Escovedo – quadruple when you count Buick MacKane, which you should. The AE String Quartet starts things off at 7 p.m., followed by Jon Langford and Sally Timms "recalling the Mekons" (no indication of whether that means a live dose of Fear and Whiskey or just some fond remembrances). Al retakes the stage at 8:15 for what looks like a 15-minute solo set, followed by Future Clouds & Radar (again, no description given). At 9:30 Al takes the stage again, this time with his acoustic band, for 30 minutes. Poi Dog Pondering plays an hour set at 10 p.m. And then we get our rock on, as Buick MacKane, Al's erstwhile glam-punk project, gets on at 11 p.m. I missed Escovedo's set with Ian Hunter at SXSW '05 or '06, which I'm sure was epic. But this might be the next best thing for those of us who love Al's Stooges-Velvets-Mott side.

The Blender Bar at the Ritz features The Sights, Robbers on High Street and Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. I've heard good things about VietNam, who are playing as part of the Kemado showcase at Bourbon Rocks on 6^th.

Buffalo Billiards is noteworthy for featuring '80s indie vet and '90s alt-rock casualty Bob Mould, who will go on at 9 p.m. Following him is a showcase for Barsuk Records, who gave the world Death Cab for Cutie. I don't know any of the bands playing this time around, but that's nothing new. Chances are, if they're on Barsuk, they'll be a good name to be dropping six months from now, or sooner.

Yep Roc will bring their customary dose of Americana thunder to the Continental Club, with Jim Lauderdale, John Doe and Los Straitjackets closing things up in that order, starting at 11 p.m.

Thomas Dolby, of "She Blinded Me With Science" fame, will be at the Elysium on Red River at 9 p.m. Sheesh … did I mention that the new season of The Office starts on Thursday night? I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin' …

There are signs of life at La Zona Rosa, where Architecture in Helsinki and What Made Milwaukee Famous are playing. Also, someone who took a sensational name from right under my nose – Elvis Perkins – is playing as well.

The Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguwar and Dead Oceans labels are hosting an interesting showcase at Mohawk Patio on Red River at 9^th, featuring I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness and Okkervil River.

Ah, here's something worth coming out for: The Norton Records showcase at Red 7 on East 7^th. I want to give special mention to the Reigning Sound, gods of the Memphis garage rock scene who apparently relocated to Asheville, NC, in 2004. Given Asheville's hippie leanings, I'm a little mystified by the move, but, judging from the band's MySpace page, the granola doesn't seemed to have dulled the band's edge. Frontman Greg Cartwright also founded Memphis legends the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers. Fans of Mitch Ryder-style blue-eyed soul and Nuggets-style garage-psych will anoint the Reigning Sound the best thing that's ever happened to them. Also on the bill is the Dexter Romweber Duo, which I would expect doesn't venture too far from the footprint of Romweber's old band, Athens stalwarts the Flat Duo Jets. And then there's Sam the Sham of "Woolly Bully" fame and The Alarm Clocks, who you've probably never heard of but who gave us "No Reason to Complain" in 1966. Seems like a can't-miss show all around.

Bloc Party are at Stubb's. I'm kinda over these guys, not that I'd be able to get in there anyway.

Iggy lurks, Champeen roars and Charlie Louvin is among us. Are You? A Clueless Outsider’s Guide to SXSW ’07, pt. 1

2007-03-12T10:39:00.001-07:00

It's March in the 512, which means Austin is fully in the throes of the glorious schmoozing orgy of indie rock-film-interactive goodness that are the South By Southwest Festivals. I haven't been since 2004, when, under the pretense of being a "consultant" (I use that word loosely, but, then again, doesn't everyone?), I had a platinum pass and thus carte blanche to pretty much everything, unless Modest Mouse was playing at La Zona Rosa and the other thousand people in line also had the same carte blanche.

Regardless, I'm rolling proletariat-style for this year's SXSW, mostly trying to scam my way into a few parties, hitting a few free events and generally looking from the outside in. Which is fine, because, when you're in your 30s and employed full-time in something besides the music industry, most of what goes down at SXSW will fly right over your head.

Take the lineup for Wednesday, when things really get going: The Merge showcase at Antone's will get its share of the hipoisie and I've heard of Ladybug Transistor and Imperial Teen. I'm guessing the "Special Guests from Austin TX" playing at 1 a.m. are Spoon. It's probably worth gambling on a day pass to find out, but, then again, if I'm right, no one with a day pass is getting in there.

The Austin Music Awards is solid and old-school. I only know Bobby Whitlock from Derek and the Dominoes, but the Tex Mex Experience with the Texas Tornadoes and Sam the Sham sounds too cool to miss. That's at 10:05 p.m. at the Austin Music Hall. Also noteworthy are Ian McLagan and the Bump Band. As a big Faces fan, I'm ashamed to admit I haven't seen McLagan yet during my time in Austin.

As per usual, the Emo's will be cooler than Lou Reed stranded on Pluto. I might skip the Victory Records showcase Wednesday evening at the Annex (but that's a personal preference), but the Annex will be rocking in the afternoon thanks to IODA's opening day bash. Yes, I'm shilling for a client, IODA, but the event is also a great cross-section of IODA's considerable roster and is not limited to a single label. Do it. Also within the Emo's footprint is the Sub Pop showcase at Emo's IV Lounge, the Beggar's Banquet showcase at Emo's Jr., and the 4AD showcase at Emo's Main Room, which will feature the only band I've heard of at Emo's: The Mountain Goats. As this will be the Goats' only set at SXSW (although they might play some satellite parties that I'm not cool enough to know about), I doubt many day pass holders will bear witness to their spectral majesty. Or see their set.

Hollywood Indie Dim Mak, which broke Bloc Party, will be kickin' it at Flamingo Cantina. I've never heard of any of their acts, but label honcho Steve Aoki will be spinning between sets as DJ Steve Aoki Kid Millionare, so there's that.

The White Ghost Shivers are playing Molotov Lounge and I can recommend them pretty heartily, especially to anyone who's a fan of any combination of Depression-era jazz, honky-tonk and burlesque.

And then there's Charlie Louvin, who's playing the Parish at 8 p.m. If you haven't heard of him, you've probably heard his songs performed by Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Uncle Tupelo and all of their alt-country progeny. I don't have the space to do justice to the Louvin Brothers' legacy and their impact on country music, but I'll note what a colossal blessing it is that Charlie, who pre-dates Johnny Cash and who will turn 80 in July, will be with us in Austin this year. Definitely a must-see. Also on tap at the Parish is the Wylie Lama himself and author of the immortal "Redneck Mother," Ray Wylie Hubbard, who takes the stage at midnight.

Tearing it up at Room 710 on Red River will be the In Music We Trust showcase, which I recommend principally for Grand Champeen, former high school classmates of mine who carry the flag high for Bob Stinson-era Replacements, cheap beer, dive bars and sweaty riff-rock. Battle Cry for Help and The One That Brought You are the kinds of offhand classics you wish Paul Westerberg remembered how to make. Check out their performance from last year's SXSW at the Red Eyed Fly in my VodPod section along the left of this blog.

“The tar baby, he don’t say nothin’.”

2007-03-07T16:09:00.001-08:00

Since selling my car to fund an excursion in Southeast Asia two years ago, I've been a public transportation denizen in California and Austin. I'd intended to have a car by now, but several things have stopped me (in no particular order):

First, the expense. One month's worth of commuting can cost you either a $10 bus pass or $600 in car payments, fuel costs, maintenance and car insurance. I like having that extra $590 in my pocket every month, particularly as I gear up for home ownership.
Second, the productivity. I read more now as a rider than I ever did as a driver. And if I need to bust out the laptop, sure it's a little awkward, but it's not impossible.
Third, the traffic and its attendant aggravation. I remember riding the train out to Intel's campus, whizzing past all those cars that were practically parked on I-80 during rush hour and thanking God I wasn't one of those saps about to blow a vein in his forehead.
Fourth, safety. There are no Type A riders. There are millions of Type A drivers. Again on I-80, I've seen several such drivers (or their victims) carted off in body bags.
Fifth, the environment. Nitpick all you want about the mounting evidence of global warming. But you're not going to point to those millions of cars on the freeways chugging fossil fuel from Global Jihad's ground zero and flooding the air with carbon monoxide and then tell me that nothing bad is happening there.

Still, I get a little burned out on public transportation. It's public. Meaning, you have to share it with obese people, smelly people, crazy people and lots of people. You sacrifice some autonomy, in that you go when and where the bus goes, as opposed to precisely whenever and wherever you feel like going.

But the egalitarian element of riding has its rewards as well, because you do get to see those snatches of people's humanity against which, for the most part, we desperately try to insulate ourselves. Today was a perfect example. A homeless-looking fellow got on the bus and, while I can't verify that he stunk, I wouldn't be surprised by it. He was missing his left arm below the elbow and the scars are there for the entire world to see. He had docile eyes, the eyes of someone who's been tossed around long enough by life's vicissitudes that he wasn't about to put up a fight about anything now. He was just trying to get where he's going.

As I said, I couldn't attest to his odor. But a middle-aged man sitting across the aisle from him certainly could. And did. First, it started off moderately:

"Whew! You need a bath, brother!"

The homeless man, wearing a New Orleans Saints cap, stared ahead, vaguely apologetic, but mostly vacant. About a minute later:

"Look, if you want to be in Austin, fine," the offended man said, possibly interpreting the Saints cap as a sign that this man was a Katrina refugee. "But you stink. You owe it to yourself and everyone here to take a bath. You ride this line every day. If you don't take a bath, we're going to get the authorities to keep you from getting on the bus."

It should be noted that the bus was completely full of riders and equally full of awkward silence. Like the homeless man, we're all just trying to get where we're going without any conflicts. But some opinions likely were beginning to form. At this point, a superficial reading of the situation would have been that, of the two, the offended man, while hostile, was still in no danger of being presumed a social miscreant … yet. The homeless guy – well, he was homeless, right? Sitting there in silence, he could be just waiting to go off. Tick, tick, tick …

Yet, like so many of us, the offended man couldn't leave well enough alone and began to squander the last of his goodwill. He'd tilt his head away from the offender, cover his face and let out a deliberately audible "whew!" Then, becoming increasingly obsessed, he'd look back at the blankly staring rider, curve his mouth to form another insult, briefly suspend the next round of hostilities, and then come out with it anyway, as though he had no choice:

"You need to get a job," he said. "You smell awful. We're going to put you to work."

Perhaps in response, a female commuter in her 30s – white, professional – got up, stood between the two men and grabbed the ceiling rails as though bracing to get off at the next stop. But she never got off while I was on the bus.

Undeterred, the vocal man craned around behind the commuter to say something, caught himself and then muttered something inaudible. It was something about dying and the drag queen seated to the quiet man cocked his eyebrow, looked at me and smirked. Sitting there like Gandhi, the homeless man gave no evidence of having heard anything. At this point, a black woman missing her top front teeth and her preschool-aged son or grandson got on the bus and the vocal man got up to offer his seat. The mother thanked him and sat down with her son and the man backed up several feet.

That should've been the end of it, but by then the bullying became compulsive. He muttered one insult I couldn't make out and then this:

"Hey man, you're gonna die."

And that was it. Instantly, collective awkwardness gave way to collective outrage. The mother lit into him first:

"Nobody needs to be talking to anybody that way," she said matter-of-factly while rifling through her pocket book. "That ain't right."

The drag queen was next:

"Just because he's different doesn't give you the right to talk to him that way. He's better off than you, anyway."

"Shut up, you faggot," the angry man said.

A woman standing in the front of the bus chimed in:

"You don't talk to people that way," she said. "I've got family members who are different from me, but I still have to love them."

"That ain't no way to treat another human being," the mother added.

"Ma'am, I respect you," the now attacked man said. "I love you."

"You don't know me!" she shot back, prompting laughter from the queen.

"Shut up, faggot!"

"You don't know me, either," the queen replied, laughing.

And so on. All the while, the homeless man kept his blank expression, occasionally lolling his eyes toward the sources of the attacks that rained down on his accuser. If his non-aggression was a deliberate tactic – something out of MLK Jr.'s and Gandhi's playbook – he'd executed it brilliantly. It was a singular moment in public transportation history: a bus full of commuters had been motivated to do something besides avoid eye contact. And yet, by doing and saying absolutely nothing, the homeless man had the mob right where he needed them. Whatever goodwill his accuser had squandered had flowed to him, and then some.

Of course, he gave no evidence of anything premeditated or even of being aware of the situation. The tar baby, he don't say nothin'.

At this point, we arrived at my stop, although, for once, I would have liked to have ridden further. Getting up, I smiled at the queen.

"Never a dull moment on the bus," I said. He nodded, grinning.

Tuesday Zen

2007-02-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

With $100Bn in market cap being wiped out in Shanghai today and the Dow down nearly 500 points as potentially the start of a "modest correction," here's something to take our minds elsewhere:
Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Red Garland Trio (Philly Joe Jones, drums; Paul Kelly, bass; Wynton Kelly, piano) perform "So What" sometime in 1958.

Sirius and XM “merge” for $13B

2007-02-19T14:13:00.001-08:00

Per this press release, the two cash-hemorrhaging satellite radio giants are combining in a tax-free, all-stock "merger of equals." I use quotes here because there's no such thing as a merger of equals. We know Sirius is the de facto acquirer because XM stockholders will be paid in Sirius stock and Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin will be the CEO of the new entity. Yes, XM Chairman Gary Parsons will be chairman of the new company, but that's getting into the realm of splitting hairs.

So is this a good thing?

From a consumer perspective: As a subscriber to neither of these offerings, I'm glad to be relieved of going through the tradeoffs between the two. I'm sure the cost of a subscription will go up, but having all of that content under one roof will be a good thing, although I'm sure there'll be a reduction of content where there are overlaps. Plus, the additional bandwidth could be used either to improve existing channels (I understand there's some noticeable compression for music channels), create new channels or add more interactive features.

From a stockholder perspective: The press release says analysts project $3B-$7B in cost synergies and, presumably a few of those analysts worked for the investment banks who earned a percentage on this deal. Still, obviously there's got to be quite a mother lode of synergies between two companies as asset-intensive as these. Per the terms, XM investors get 4.6 shares of Sirius for every XM share they own. Currently, XM shares are trading at $13.98 and Sirius shares are trading at $3.70, so, if the effective date were today, XM investors would be getting $17.02 apiece for their shares, which is a 22% premium. Not bad for a company that lost $666.72M last year. For investors in Sirius, which lost $863M last year, I dunno, I'd tolerate quite a bit of dilution if you could eliminate my only direct competitor and get even a billion in red off my income statement.

From a regulatory perspective: Depending on how you define the market and its competitors, this could reek of monopoly. But the fact is that there are still countless other ways to get radio content – for free. Plus, mobile devices such as iPods can carry free and subscription syndicated content in the form of podcasts. And, unlike satellite radio, you can listen to your iPod at 30,000 feet or in a tunnel. Sirius and XM have known for a long time that they were competing with a much larger universe than simply companies who can afford to broadcast from space. Frankly, if these companies aren't allowed to merge, it's not clear to me how they're supposed to survive without seriously jacking up subscription costs, which would probably kill them as well.

The Enemy of My Enemy

2007-02-15T13:40:00.001-08:00

In my view, the two-party system has been the bane of American politics for close to a century, but it’s been particularly cancerous in the television era. The primary pursuits I see Democrats and Republicans engaged in are fund-raising and one-upmanship. Ideology stopped being a differentiator a long time ago and it’ll continue to be irrelevant in the absence of meaningful campaign finance reform. Bill Clinton is no more a liberal than George Bush is a conservative. They’re just two salesmen with really savvy handlers in Carville and Rove.

And, at the risk of digression, can we shitcan this linear view of political thought as being a single axis with the words “liberal” at the left end and “conservative” at the right? How can one axis possibly account for a person’s views on fiscal policy, domestic policy, foreign policy, etc.?

So with that preamble out of the way, I’m always mystified when someone tells me they’re registered as a Democrat or a Republican. I mean, I understand if you plan on working in politics, because you need to declare your allegiance up front. But if you’re just a voter with no other dog in the fight, why make it easy on the bastards? If I register as a Democrat, I’ve basically told Howard Dean, “Go ahead and sell out to other interests, because I’m already in your back pocket come November.” Instead, I want Dems and Pubs competing for my vote all the way down the stretch, for the same reason that I want Apple and Microsoft to keep improving their products every year. And I want third, fourth and fifth parties competing with Dems and Pubs for the same reason that I want Linux, Google/YouTube and legions of startups around to hold Jobs’ and Gates’ feet to the fire.

I’ve often thought it’s a real irony that the U.S. has taken it upon itself to be an active proponent of democracy worldwide, because our own political system has, at best, never been more than an oligarchy. The word “democracy” connotes an open marketplace of political thought. Two parties deeply beholden to corporate interests doesn’t even faintly resemble such a marketplace. Moreover, the recurrence of names like “Adams,” “Clinton,” “Kennedy” and “Bush” in the American electoral process makes our version of democracy seem like something slightly more competitive than a monarchy. Lastly, “democracy” is the idea that we all take a vote, tabulate a majority and someone lands in office as a direct result of that majority. But the U.S. has a built-in middle man in the Electoral College, whose position is, “Yeah, we’ll probably vote the wishes of the proletariat, but not necessarily.” See 2000.

Fellow Georgia Bulldog and Columbusite Doug Gillett of Hey Jenny Slater has extended an invitation to Libertarians to reconsider the Democrats, arguing that Republicans no longer carry the flag for small government, fiscal prudence, Constitutional freedoms and all the other goodies that Libertarian-leaning blokes like myself hold dear. And good on him for trying.

While I did hold my nose and pull the lever for Kerry in 2004, it was mostly a protest vote and calculated, low-risk one at that, given that I reside in Texas, where Kerry can probably count on one hand the number of votes he pulled outside of the 512. It was the same kind of what-the-hell vote I made in 2000, when, living in North Carolina, I wrote in Ralph Nader’s name in the 2000 election. I took grief from a lot of misguided Democrat friends for that one.

“You’re voting against Gore,” they said.

“Uh, yep,” I said.

“So you might as well have voted for Bush,” they said.

“No, I’m pretty sure I voted against him, too,” I replied.

“But you’re helping split Gore’s base,” they said. “You’re hurting Gore more than you’re hurting Bush.”

“Bro, I live in the home state of Jesse Helms and Tobacco Road,” I responded. “As far as Gore’s concerned, this state was a write-off from Day 1. So I’m free to do whatever the hell I want, which, in this case, happens to be to express my disgust with the two-party system.”

This last time around, I stopped short of pulling the lever for the Libertarians, because, in 2004 and even today, I can’t take seriously anyone who argues that we should pack our things and skylift ourselves out of Iraq right this nanosecond, although the idea grows more appealing by the hour. Nader has some nutty ideas as well, but nothing of his stood out as sack-of-rabid-weasels crazy as leaving Iraq to become the next Rwanda.

So I appreciate the invitation to get under the Democrats’ tent, but all I’m ever gonna do is hang by the keg and eat the finger food. Democrats recruiting Libertarians on the premise that we’re disenfranchised conservatives is like Catholics recruiting moderate Muslims because they’re not down with beheadings: there are still too many fundamental differences to make this anything more than a marriage of convenience.

If I want both of these parties competing for my vote, then I want to send a semi-coherent message about how either of them can win it.

If I vote Democrat, I have no idea what kind of message I’m sending to Republicans. To the infinitesimally small extent that either party gives a damn about ideology anymore, am I telling Republicans that winning my vote requires more social programs, nationalized health care or unlimited punitive damages for medical malpractice suits? I hope not, but the risk is substantial.

Or am I telling them that I think we should allocate our resources in Iraq towards training Iraqi security and that our immigration policy should recognized the difference between someone educated at the Indian Institute of Technology and someone schooled at a Saudi madrassah? I’d love to think so, but surely not.

Or am I telling them that government has no business proselytizing on the sanctity of marriage and that it’s time to quit farting around with gay marriage amendments and just balance the Goddamned budget before we become one big vacation home for China, Japan and Germany while we’re stuck trading dollars for pesos on a 1:1 basis? Again, love to think so, but doubt it entirely.

Basically, all I get across to Republicans by voting for Obama, Edwards or Clinton in ’08 is me throwing a shitfit, cutting my nose to spite my face.

So I appreciate the invite and I appreciate how far Dems have evolved from LBJ’s “Great Society” and what they’ve done to keep the Pubs honest, but the enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend.

A lot of people view elections the same way they view a football game: there are two sides duking it out and, if the side I voted for wins, I win. And, if I win, I must be right. As in, “yes, I know politics is a subjective matter, but, then again, over half the country sided with me, so …uh, scoreboard, bitch!”

And if you look at things that way, then third partiers like me have big red Ls on our foreheads. So, perhaps out of self-rationalization, I reject that view. Instead, I view an election in terms of desired outcomes. If you voted for Bush in 2000 because you liked what he said about it not being the U.S.’s job to go around nation-building, guess what? Bush won, but you didn’t. And if you voted for Clinton because nationalized health care and gays in the military were your hot-button issues, then you lost even though Bill won.

So in the absence of a viable third party, all that’s left for folks like me (and I suspect there’s a lot of us) is to wield our votes as carrots and sticks to guide candidates towards outcomes we desire.

Ready or Not

2007-01-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already, do yourself a service and check out Warren St. John's piece in the New York Times about the Fugees. Not Wyclef and Lauren, but these guys:

All over. On to the shoutin', pt. 1.

2007-01-20T15:13:00.000-08:00

Alright, so fast-forward to the present, which from a college football perspective, bears all the lush, verdant promise one feels when heading east out of Indio, California: Not yet oblivion, but right on its cusp. Having closed things out with the retina-searing image of a crystal football in gator hands, we now look forward to National Signing Day. After that, well let’s just say it’s a long damn way to Phoenix.

Basically, what the football gods have left us with is the cleanup from a lot of rolled coaches’ heads and, for any D-1 program looking to move Jamie Newberg’s meter on Signing Day, all that blood should have been mopped up well before now.

If you’re still on brain detail, call this guy.

So, in no particular order, here’s the first of several looks at how a few programs relevant to the fortunes of Georgia football got their shit together for Signing Day.

Miami: From a Bulldog perspective, if you looked at the state of Florida as though it were Afghanistan (and I do), the Gators, obviously, are the Taliban, while Miami is whatever warlord is running things in the Northeast. The Hurricanes don’t occupy anything remotely resembling moral high ground, but they are useful. As with Alabama, a healthy Miami helps Georgia; in Da U’s case, it’s because the ‘Canes recruit against the Gators in the Sunshine State’s hottest hotbeads for high school talent, although they don’t play the Gators that often.

Apparently bereft of a better way to fill the Orange Bowl, Miami scheduled FIU in a game that would have been a non-event to anyone outside of Dade County, but which resulted in a massive brawl that cost Lamar “We Ready” Thomas his job and hastened head coach Larry Coker’s exit.

Picking up the pieces is Randy Shannon, previously the ‘Canes defensive coordinator. No qualms from me on that one. Defense was one of the ‘Canes strong suits and keeping Shannon on board communicates some stability to the recruits. By offering Shannon the promotion, cash-strapped Miami likely spared itself a wallet-emptying hire a la Alabama. Plus, he’s black, which, as Orson notes, raises the odds considerably that, in the not too distant future, Miami will be firing a black coach. Kudos to Da U then for being willing to risk that shitstorm.

A more intriguing hire was that of Patrick “Spike it on 3^rd Down, Reggie” Nix, previously Georgia Tech’s offensive coordinator. Gator fans may remember Nix’s pass to Frank Sanders in 1994 with 36 seconds to go help Auburn beat Steve Spurrier's then-top ranked Gators. If not, here’s some fresh salt for your wounds, gators. Georgia fans, of course, remember him fondly for this sequence:

There are a lot of ways to look at this hire. Nix has had a lot to do with Tech’s recent surge in recruiting. He was also Reggie Ball’s position coach and architected the following scoring outbursts:

10 points against Utah in 2005
7 points against North Carolina in 2006
6 points against Wake Forrest in 2006

Whether Nix to Miami is addition by subtraction for Tech, whether this is a lateral move for Nix, and whether this is a good hire for Miami are all highly debatable issues. I’m not sure how good of a recruiter you need to be in order to recruit well in Coral Gables. The talent’s right there in your back yard and it’s crawling all over itself to don orange and green. That said, if you’re a high school player in Florida and you haven’t gotten texted by Urban Meyer, you need to pay ya beeper bill, bitch. Nix’s offense will never be confused with the kinds of Ultimate Frisbee/Arena Ball track meets that used to pack the OB’s seats. That said, ‘Canes fans aren’t in much of a position to judge since most of their seats were empty when Georgia Tech beat Miami. Ahem, twice. In succession. Granted, neither of those wins had anything to do with offense, but I’m just throwing that out there. Tech also lit up Auburn twice. Maybe the guy knows something. As for what this means for Nix’s career, I guess he comes out a little ahead. Neither Tech nor Miami have budgets befitting their position in a BCS conference, but let’s just say Miami comes with a few intangibles missing at Tech.

Neither of these places screams “family friendly,” but I know where I’d rather be.

So. On to what’s important: What’s it all mean to Georgia?

Impact on Tech: In light of 2006’s Coastal Division crown and Chan Gailey’s return to the Flats, the Chan Gailey Equilibrium should reassert itself with a vengeance in 2007. That means the Jackets will follow 2006’s nine wins with a five-win campaign in 2007 to balance things at the mandatory 7-win average. Calvin Johnson knew he was powerless to affect that outcome and perhaps Nix did as well, hence both of their departures. I don’t expect too much fall out on the recruiting front this close to signing day, although the Dawgs might be able to make a run at one or two of Tech’s in-state commitments. But I don’t expect there’ll be a spectacular hire to upgrade from Nix’s Xs and Os boobery. This isn’t addition by subtraction, as is the case with Game Ball’s departure, and the CGE will have its way regardless, so the impact on Georgia is somewhere between negligible and slightly positive, depending on what recruiting dividends are paid.

Impact on Florida: Miami does come to Gainesville in 2008. If Charlie Strong isn’t a head coach somewhere else by then (which would be a travesty), this could turn into a ritualized baby seal clubbing. Florida will be staffed entirely by Meyer’s almost exclusively 5-star recruits and, if there really is something to Tim Tebow and the spread offense, God help us all in ’08. However, as I said above, Nix has hurt the Gators before. Out-recruiting Meyer might be a tall order, but if Nix can at least hold serve in South Florida, Meyer might have to slum with a few 4-star recruits. I don’t think Nix in Miami helps Florida, but I don’t think his being there correlates heavily with Bulldog wins in Jacksonville either.

"Well it’s been rough and rocky travelin’ ..."

2007-01-20T12:33:00.000-08:00

To steal one from Steve Earle, our divorce from Austin did not work out. Upon returning, we’ve noticed a few changes, including an alarmingly Atlanta-esque number of cranes downtown. But over the past 18 months, mostly what’s changed is us – we’re married, employed and thoroughly disabused of any romantic notions about the California lifestyle.

Regarding the Golden State, well, what I can I say, given such a short stay? As an impartial observer, I’m amused at how similar the populations of California and Texas are, given their antipathy toward one another. Both are large states with multiple metropolitan areas jammed with SUVs driven by people who share a charitable view towards plastic surgery and $200 blue jeans. Californians sneer at Texans for their conservatism and then give the world Nixon, Reagan, Charlton Heston and Schwarzenegger. If there really were a day without a Mexican, both states would fall flat on their faces economically and likely starve from burrito deprivation.

There are differences as well, but, outside of the politics in Berkeley and Hollywood, it would be myopic to even mention them. Having driven across the country several times, I am profoundly saddened by the sameness of the Assimilated States of America. You have to look hard between the Home Depots, Wal-Marts, Taco Bells and forests of mobile phone towers to catch the faintest glimmer of what everyone from the Native Americans through Jack Kerouac saw. For more on that, please check out Fast Food Nation and your local zoning board.

As you’ve also noticed, what’s also changed is the title and URL of this blog. Given recent traffic counts, I figured I wasn’t risking much by flipping my handle and kicking out the beer cans and pizza boxes. Whether that’ll translate to a higher post count is TBD, but every New Year begins with the highest hopes.

So, dear readers – all one of you – thanks for your continued and utterly undeserved patronage. Happy aught-seven!

End of Season News and Notes

2006-11-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

Alas, the 12 Saturdays of Christmas are behind us, leaving only a few dozen meaningless bowl games, including one that likely will prove what we already know: Ohio State runs this joint and everyone else is just furniture. But vultures like me love to pick the bones of this season’s carcass to try to make some Brunswick Stew out of it. So, without further ado …

The Coaching Guillotine: Alabama, Miami, NC State, North Carolina and Arizona State have all rolled heads. Am I leaving anyone out? Due to recentness and regional bias, I’m going to give special focus to Alabama.

I agree with Paul Westerdawg that, generally speaking, what’s good for Bama football is good for Georgia as well. Like Georgia, they annually play and recruit against Auburn and Tennessee. And, unlike Auburn and Tennessee, we don’t have to deal with Alabama every year. By posting 1-3 and 0-4 marks respectively against the Vols and Plainsmen, our man in Tuscaloosa has done us few favors.

But hubris and an itchy trigger finger have been crippling to the Capstone since Bear Bryant’s retirement in 1982. A program that’s gone through six head coaches in 24 years hardly screams “job security,” so firing a coach in what is already a seller’s market for top-tier coaches was an ill-timed maneuver. And for all its tradition, support and resources, pitching Alabama in 2006 is like pitching Pitney Bowes, Western Union or Kodak: what made them dominant back in the day now threatens them with obsolescence. In Alabama’s case, that asset-turned-liability is its culture of overly involved big-money boosters, which would be intimidating to any coaching candidate not named Steve Spurrier, and I don’t think he’s going anywhere.

Now with that said, there’s plenty to recommend the Alabama gig over the other vacancies, particularly now that UNC has got their man. Like Alabama, Miami, Arizona State and NC State all have competitive in-state rivals. And they’re all in conferences with plenty of parity. I don’t know what their athletic budgets are like (although I know Miami’s is paltry and its bottom line is a seven-figure number in brackets). But I think it’s a safe assumption that Alabama will throw more money and support at a winner than will the other bidders in this year’s coaching auction.

Last words on this: Shula was clearly a desperation hire. The only thing that made him a better hire than Ray Goff is the fact that Georgia had pretty much the entire 1988 season to find Dooley’s replacement and Goff, sadly, was still the best we could come up with. The Bama gig fell into Shula’s lap in the shadow of two-a-days after … (must … resist … lame quip about laps, Mike Price and strippers) … anyway, you get the point. Having posted the opening right after Thanksgiving, Alabama ought to have enough time to get the hire right this time.

On to Georgia. Well, we closed it out with the now perfunctory Reggie Ball implosion. At halftime, a friend called to take my temperature on the game. “Well, it’s a tight game and Reggie is still healthy,” I replied. “So I’ve already lit the cigar.”

As Stafford & Co. lined up in the victory formation to salt away the final 60 seconds, CBS’ camera panned over to the Georgia Tech bench, where Ball was patting the shoulders and helmets of his team mates. There could not have been a lonelier image. Not a single player so much as glanced in his direction. In the waning seconds of his final regular season game, Reggie’s teammates accorded him less attention they would have to a fart in the breeze.

Ball is one of the more curious characters in the history of Clean Old-Fashioned Hate. I really can’t think of another rival player for whom I’ve felt so much distaste that it’s caused me to feel outright compassion for everyone else associated with his program. By being such a honking embarrassment for four years, he managed to humanize a program Dan Magill termed "the eternal enemy." If you’re a Tech fan or player, what do you make of a guy who picks fights with an opposing team’s trainers, loses track of downs and single-handedly squanders the greatest receiving talent in your program’s history – all against your hands-down biggest rival? And how does one muster optimism for a program that, in four years, failed to put anyone more consistent under center than a guy whose football IQ is the same as his jersey number?

The last shot I saw of Reggie (and it may well be one of the last times any of us ever see him on camera, unless he shows up on “COPS”), he was separate from his teammates, surrounded only by two state troopers, as “Reg-gie, Reg-gie!” chants rained down on him from the Georgia students, whose derision didn't stop there. And yet it was likely from Tech fans that he needed police protection. If it were anyone else – say, Steve Taneyhill, Casey Clausen or George Godsey – I might have felt pity. As it was, I feel only bafflement.

I know the stats say otherwise, but you could almost argue that Tech was one player away from a win Saturday. And that player would be the hothead with the ridiculously overcompensating sleeves of tattoos on his arms. Note that I said almost, because if you’ve got Paul Oliver’s back, I’ve got yours. In the admittedly rare instances when Ball was on target to Calvin Johnson, Oliver intervened to heroic effect. When a 6’5”, 235-pound All-American receiver who runs a 4.3 40 leaves the field with two catches for 13 yards and no touchdowns (in spite of a first-and-goal), you have to awe the guy who was covering him.

I was pleased to read that Mike Bobo was calling the plays Saturday and that play-calling will be a new part of his job description. As Paul notes, the view from the booth is superior to the view from the field, and it is high time Richt gravitated away from the minutiae of toss sweeps and out routes and developed the holistic perspective of a head coach. And while Bobo’s playcalling only netted 8 points, it also produced Georgia’s most memorable drive since David Greene’s two-minute drill against Tennessee in 2001. And, unlike last year’s Tech game (in which we had a veteran QB and greater talent across the offense), Georgia dominated every meaningful offensive stat – time of possession, first downs, third-down conversions, total yards and turnovers.

So, with an 8-4 regular season in the can and a presumptive trip to the Peach Bowl ahead, where does that leave us? In pretty good shape, I think; a helluva lot better than where things were headed in October. Matthew Stafford has figured out how to drive Richt’s and Bobo’s offense someplace other than into a telephone pole, his receivers have learned what to do when he points his Howitzer their way and Richt’s evolution as a head coach has progressed with some much-needed delegation of playcalling duties. As might be expected of a defense coordinated by a former DB coach, our rushing defense remains suspect, but we closed the season by bowing up in a pair of rivalry games, allowing less than 200 yards and 20 points in each. Our OL will lose depth, some of which will be missed, some of which … eh, not so much. Regardless, help is on the way. Really. EDIT: Cavalry's still comin'.

In the meantime, here some final thoughts on the season that was. As is probably the case for most Georgia fans, the final ledger was far less of a surprise than how we got there. Losses to Vanderbilt and Kentucky, bookended by a shutout of Spurrier in Columbia and a mauling of Auburn on the Plains: Not exactly what anyone was dialing up in August. Other than in the fourth quarter against Tennessee, we weren’t shown to be tangibly inferior to anyone and most of our wounds were of the self-inflicted variety. A sub-par year, yes, but, as 8-4 years go, this one points to more of an upside than 2000 and 2001 did.

Georgia-Auburn 2006: Anatomy of a Pantsing

2006-11-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

Beating Auburn is like pouring the new Beaujolais. It’s not nearly enough to merely consume this seasonal treat. You must savor it fully; really give the palette a workout and make sure you capture the full bouquet.

This year’s edition – Georgia’s 700^th win all-time – was a 37-15 undressing, capped by Georgia taking a knee at the Auburn 7 with just under three minutes remaining. Georgia’s triumph on the so-called Loveliest Village on the Plains was the Bulldogs’ most emphatic thrashing of a top-five team in 64 years.

And yet, while Mark Richt has shown a penchant for last-minute wins that shred Larry Munson’s vocal chords, Richt is usually good for one of these types of wins every season as well. By “these types of wins,” I’m talking about an out-of-the-blue, lightning-in-a-bottle asskicking of one of our biggest rivals. These are historically competitive series on which commentators typically pile on the “throw out the record books” clichés, yet are shockingly over by halftime.

In 2002, it was hanging a half-hundred on a beleaguered Tech. In 2003, Richt hit a trifecta: 30-0 at Clemson, 41-14 at Tennessee and 26-7 against Auburn. In 2004, it was the 45-16 Greene-to-Gibson clinic against LSU. Boise State, which Georgia pounded 48-13, wasn’t a rival, but they were the preseason’s most fashionable upset pick.

Unlike last year’s track meet edition, in which the winner was the last team with the ball, this year’s tilt was a grinding affair defined by scoring drives that seemingly took weeks to complete, punctuated by a few Stafford smart bombs to Martrez Milner A.J. Bryant, Kenneth Harris, Mohamed Massaquoi and Mike Moore.

That the winning team posted 227 rushing yards should come as no surprise, given the schools’ output of tailbacks such as Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Stephen Davis, Garrison Hearst, Carnell “Cadillac” Williams and Terrell Davis. Still this statistic is immensely gratifying to Georgia fans, who have been lectured ad nauseum by Auburn fans and their coach about our supposed lack of commitment to running the ball.

Indulge me with a few more game stats, because, if you’re like me and grew up in West Georgia during Bo Jackson’s blitzkrieg, the pleasure that comes from this kind of demolition is ecstasy. And, really, any Dawg fan who’s suffered through this season is going to be swishing numbers like these around in his mouth for a while:

Georgia ran 66 offensive plays, compared to Auburn’s 37. Georgia held the ball for 38 minutes and 12 seconds, compared to Auburn’s 21 minutes and 48 seconds. Georgia racked up 446 total yards to Auburn’s 171.

In a sense, Georgia did to Auburn what Auburn usually does to its opponents: sits on the ball for an eternity and smothers the opponent during the infrequent lapses when the ball isn’t in their possession.

Auburn? Auburn! You got knocked dafuggout!

But there was a lot more sweetness to this win than Georgia merely drowning Auburn in its own medicine, although that alone would’ve been plenty.

For starters, we got the best glimpse yet of the arriving promise of Matthew Stafford, the full-bodied Texan who flicks the long ball and peels off long runs with deceptive ease. We saw yesterday Matthew Stafford do the things in a Georgia uniform that we drooled over him doing in a Highland Park uniform. In place of interceptions, Stafford hit his own receivers with the touch and authority of an underclassman who’s finally growing into his silver britches. After one long run was marred by a fumble, he showed his learning on a subsequent run by diving after crossing the first-down marker. Sure, he left a few yards on the table, but, almost veteran-like, he knew when to leave well enough alone. Along those lines, while humming along to a 70% completion rate, Stafford had the poise to “burn it” by throwing one out of the end zone instead of forcing it. He scored on the next play. The growing up in public of Matt Stafford appears to have reached its apex.

Of course, Stafford was helped considerably by a patchwork OL (led by the injured, but sucking it up heroically Ken Shackelford) that treated Auburn’s DL like a Zen rock garden, pushing around a blitzing-off-the-bus Auburn defensive front to allow the passing and running games do whatever they chose.

Hamstrung all season by brick-mitted receivers, Georgia’s offense looked Saturday as though it had wrapped the field in flytrap tape. That goes for defense, too, given the pick party that Tra Battle and Paul Oliver threw at Brandon Cox’s expense.

After Georgia stoned Steve Spurrier and South Carolina in Columbia, I said I was done complaining about Willie Martinez. And that lasted about a week.

Well, it’s funny how good your defense looks when your offense isn’t turning the ball over five times a game, and I don’t mean that to sound like faint praise. Holding an Al Borges-coached offense to less than 200 yards is a hell of an accomplishment, particularly when that offense includes former Heisman hopeful Kenny Irons, who probably accounted for more offense by himself against us last year. Right now, Brandon Cox is making Ray Gant a sandwich and ironing Tra Battle’s shirts.

Vietnam Joins WTO; Intel Invests $1bn

2006-11-10T12:23:00.000-08:00

Somewhat overshadowed by the latest steps by Russia to join the World Trade Organization, tiny but fast-growing Vietnam has joined the international trade club after coughing up about 900 pages’ worth of concessions.

This is a significant development for Vietnam (pop. 84M), whose textile- and agriculture-driven economy has resembled ours about a century ago and whose population is still shaking off the ill effects of “The American War” and life under communist government and all its attendant corruption.

But it’s a milestone in US history as well. The “domino theory” that cost us 58,000 lives (and that cost Vietnam 1.5M lives) on the premise that military force was the only way to turn back the Red Tide has been further debunked. A chapter has ended.

It may also be a milestone for a global economy that is increasingly beholden to intellectual property and copyright, which have been speed bumps in the path of China’s booming economy. While I believe concerns about the impact of globalization of the U.S. economy and the American worker are valid, I recognize that the toothpaste is already out of the tube. Going forward, efforts should coalesce around protecting the underlying value of companies that participate in Asia’s growth.

Currently or recently communist states like China, Vietnam and Russia have poor track records of protecting any kind of property rights, much less the intellectual variety. When China acceded to the WTO, a bevy of IP laws were passed but rarely enforced.

As Sherman Katz, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment think tank, told the Financial Times: “The experience with China was that although 3,000 laws were passed, we didn’t get the enforcement we hoped we would. It was doubly disappointing because during the accession process there were pretty specific statements from China about enforcement.”

With each new member, joining the WTO entails higher hurdles. While China was allowed to join by promising to change its laws in the future, Vietnam had to make massive legal reforms in advance. It also had to swallow nearly 900 pages of documents obligating it to slash trade barriers, end many subsidies, allow foreign companies to buy Vietnamese ones and protect intellectual property rights. Additionally, in labeling Vietnam a “non-market economy” for up to 12 years, it will be easier for the WTO to impose emergency tariffs to block Vietnamese imports they deem to be subsidized or sold below cost.

A little over 18 months ago, I was traveling in Southeast Asia with a team of fellow MBA candidates, consulting for an American textile marketer that was looking for a manufacturer in the region. After sizing up opportunities in Malaysia and Singapore, we recommended a partner in Vietnam. Along with our recommendation, we included the caveat that our client wait until Vietnam joined the WTO, as it would be difficult for them to summon the legal resources necessary to enforce a contract in Vietnamese courts, where the chances of getting an unbiased incorruptible judge were dubious at best.

Yet with new laws come new means for corruption. A perfunctory part of daily life in cities like Ho Chi Minh is “tea money,” an expression used for payoffs demanded by chronically underpaid police. But it’s also a proxy for the economic lubricant that determines which laws get enforced in whose favor and which deals get approved. The WTO must still rely on Vietnam to enforce its own laws fairly.

Still, the big win for Vietnam and the rest of the world is the increased confidence in doing business with the country and the prospect of Vietnam joining its neighbors in the Information Economy. Foreign firms committed almost US$6.5bn in new investment in the country in the year to October, a year-on-year increase of 41.4%, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment.

Notable among those firms investing in Vietnam is my former employer, Intel Corp., which today announced it would deploy $1bn to expand its assembly and test facility area now under construction in the Saigon High-Tech Park to 500,000 square feet from 150,000 square feet. That would make it the largest single factory within the firm’s assembly and test network.

Bret Bielema’s mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.

2006-11-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

This is so spectacularly loaded with schadenfreude that I am having a full-on Hedley Lamarr moment:

Why do I love this so much? First and foremost, because it exposes an irrevocable flaw in the new clock rules, which were designed to correct something that no one thought was a problem to begin with: Long games. Long games mean more football and thus more reason to drink more beer while watching more football. And as games go longer, particularly in overtime, they become that much more compelling television, which would imply greater value for advertisers.

Conversely, the problem with shorter games should be self evident: They’re shorter. Duh. Less offense. Less excitement. The two-minute drill begins somewhere around the five-minute mark.

But the NCAA rules committee, operating squarely under the thumb of the networks, instituted new rules to make the clock run when the ball is not in play – the latest step in a grand conspiracy to place the outcome of the college football season further in control of advertisers.

So Wisconsin coach Bret Bielema takes a colossal step outside of Barry Alvarez’s shadow with this bit of pre-halftime special teams genius. On first viewing, I was left so speechless I could do little else but wish him the best of luck shopping for trousers massive enough to accommodate his considerable brass. God help anyone behind him in an airport security line.

Also, I’m in a small but growing minority of people who have tired of Joe Paterno’s never-ending farewell tour. He’s been careening towards his Woody Hayes moment for several years now and this was another step in that direction. JoePa could’ve fought smart with smart by taking the five-yard penalty at the end of the run-back, which he had two opportunities to do (granted, doing so would’ve put him as far back as his own 15). Instead JoePa was reduced to the now familiar – yet still futile – tactic of excoriating the refs, cameramen and anyone else within spitting distance.

Unified Iraq: A Political (dis)Solution?

2006-08-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

About five or six paragraphs into this weekender from the New York Times, one of those random, “call me crazy, but …” thoughts crept into my head: Exactly why is a unified Iraq so important to the United States? Judging by quantitative and anecdotal data, unification appears to be a political solution desired by few, if any, Iraqis. And the U.S. has been perfectly content to let other nations splinter into factions, reference Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Republics and much of sub-Saharan Africa. If it's permissible for those groups to splinter into countries the size of Rhode Island, why are we so obsessed with keeping Iraq glued together?

Historically, Iraq has been a synthetic country, with outsiders frequently drawing its political borders for it. The Umayyads ruled it from Damascus from the seventh century until 1258, when the Mongols devastated Baghdad. The Ottoman Turks ruled it until World War I, when the Ottomans bet on the wrong horse – Germany – and were driven out of the area by Great Britain. The League of Nations then made the area a mandate of Britain, which granted independence in 1932. Between then and 2003, the area was under the thumb of the Hashemite monarchy and Saddam Hussein’s regime, with a few military coup d’etats sprinkled in between.

In essence, Iraq has been a Mexican standoff of warring tribes that have only ever been united under the thumb of remote or domestic dictatorship.

The party line from the Bush Administration has been that a unified Iraq promotes the spread of democracy in a region that has never known democracy. Right. Because, as soon as despots to the right and left of Iraq see how well democracy is working there, they'll happily hand over power to the people and not give a second's thought to destabilizing a viable threat to how they've done business for decades. Regardless, there are innumerable reasons why the optimal conditions that have nurtured democracy in the West aren’t apparent in Iraq or the Middle East, but that’s a separate debate. Instead, let’s look at what democracy has borne out so far:

In October of last year, over 63% of eligible Iraqis voted on whether to accept or reject the new constitution, which passed with a 78% overall majority. So far, so good. But support varied widely between the country’s three ethnic territories, with Shia and Ķurdish communities overwhelmingly backing it and the Sunnis overwhelmingly rejecting it. For reference, Shiite Arabs make up 60% of Iraq’s population and the Kurds and Sunnis take 20% apiece.

Two months later, per the terms of the new body of law, the country conducted nationwide parliamentary elections, in which the overwhelming majority of all three major ethnic groups in Iraq voted along ethnic lines. Resembling more of an ethnic headcount than a competitive election, the vote set the stage for the division of the country along ethnic lines. So if you’re looking for clear, quantifiable evidence that unification is not a preferred solution in the minds of most Iraqis, the December 15 election should serve as a credible data point. Some will note that desegregation's prospects in the Deep South didn't seem so promising in Reconstruction's immediate aftermath and that worked out alright. Yeah, and it only took roughly a century for the cross burnings and mass lynchings to stop.

An equally glaring data point is Iraq’s roughly $130 billion external debt, which creditors are considering rescheduling or even writing off. The Paris Club, an informal group of financial officials from 19 of the world’s richest countries (including the U.S.), was owed $42 billion before agreeing to write off 80% of that total in November 2004. Oil has traditionally provided roughly 95% of the Iraq’s foreign exchange earnings, which makes oil doubly important in Iraq: the world has a lot of cash sunk in Iraq and, if it is to get any of that cash back, Iraq needs to be able to sell its oil.

As an aside, one of my reasons for questioning the strategic benefit of a unified Iraq had to do with maintaining a diversity of oil suppliers. Surely, I reasoned, our Harvard MBA President recognizes the risk of one supplier gaining leverage over us by becoming the source of a disproportionate amount of our oil (see Venezuela and Saudi Arabia). But it should be noted that the U.S. has derived between 4-7% of its crude oil imports from Iraq between 2000 and 2005 and thus isn’t particularly dependent on Iraq for its oil per se. A unified and thus more competitive Iraq could drive down oil prices, so there goes that argument.

So a case could certainly be made that the rest of the world needs Iraq to be unified so that its oil supply chain can be optimized, such that reserves in the oil-rich Kurdish north can flow undisturbed down a major oil pipeline through the oil-poor, Sunni center of the country and the oil-rich, Shiite south and finally out for export via the Persian Gulf. (See image; source: Stratfor) With that economic backbone intact, the country can attempt to rebuild its economy, stimulate foreign direct investment and pay down its debt.

Certainly, allowing Iraq to be split three ways would make for a messy debt resolution process. What portion of the balance should be placed on the shoulders of each faction? How would the oil-poor Sunnis pay their share?

Privatization could lead to a solution, as taxes on the assets and income of companies that harvest and sell Mesopotamian oil could go towards debt service, but, again, according to what split? Amer Ziab el-Tamimi of Beirut’s Dar Al Hayat offers one possible solution:

“This debt could be resold to investors as proprietary rights in a number of Iraqi companies in major fields. This way the privatization process could go on in line with the process of developing these companies and without any harm to the national interests.”

In other words, turn Iraq's debt into a proxy for equity in one or more for-profit oil companies operating there. By resolving the debt issue, the three tribes under its yolk could go their separate ways if it were in the national interest, as it appears to be.

Chasing the Trout

2006-08-21T18:08:00.001-07:00

“I don’t think I do music. I think I do spells.”

Don Van Vliet to Lester Bangs, 1980

For about 10 years, Captain Beefheart’s music has fascinated me, which is not to say that I’ve ever been able to appreciate it. Until now and, even now, I’m not sure that I’m there yet. An appreciation of Beefheart, for me, has been like a trout in a stream: a fleeting shiny thing that catches your eye, but, then again, it could’ve been the sunlight reflecting off the current. I blink, and then again, I swear I see it bathing in the bubbles churned up by the tiny rapids.

For those who otherwise couldn't be bothered, the Captain, née Don Van Vliet, is a virtuoso on at least a half-dozen instruments with a vocal range that covers about as many octaves (although, from my listening experience, I mostly hear him ricocheting in the same range of Howlin’ Wolf). A linear description of his music is that it’s free-association poetry set to a hurdy-gurdy combination of R&B, blues, garage rock, free jazz and avant-garde experimentalism.

But we’re talking about a guy who directed his musicians (a coterie known as the Magic Band) by drawing the songs as shapes and diagrams and who admires the bleating of a goose as much or more than he does the skronk of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler or Eric Dolphy. So a linear description isn’t going to get us very far. Whatever you think of this music, it’s impossible to be neutral about it. But even if you love it, there’s no way you can put this music on and leave it anywhere but in your primary focus. Trying to clean your house with this stuff on would drive even the tweediest music professor up the walls. This music demands that you sit down and deal with it directly.

I first got introduced to the Captain by a band mate, the same guy who put me on to Tom Waits, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Pavement. And in spite of how central those recommendations have been to my music listening over the past decade, my trepidation about investing in Beefheart has been considerable. Consider that, in those years, I’ve plunked down for Free Jazz, Ascension, Spiritual Unity, Blank Generation, Out To Lunch! and loads more in the CASTBOTU (Critically Acclaimed Shit That Borders On The Unlistenable) genre. Seriously, there’s enough wailing squawk in my music collection to give the dogs in my neighborhood seizures for weeks.

“A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?”
Captain Beefheart, “Pachuco Cadaver”

Today I dialed up Trout Mask Replica, reputedly his masterpiece, for the second time this week, and sat down to write this with the intent of proudly proclaiming that I finally “get” this music. My first effort at Beefheartian appreciation was 1967’s Safe As Milk, which was his first album (featuring a then-teenaged Ry Cooder, who was already sitting in with Taj Mahal and the Rolling Stones). In sonic terms, Milk was Howlin’ Wolf wandering the Mojave Desert with only peyote and tequila to guide him. Even still, Milk was Beefheart’s last drive-by in the same area code of anything resembling convention. Saying you get Beefheart because you dig Safe As Milk almost seems like a copout, like saying you appreciate the lyrical genius of Lennon-McCartney and then citing “She Loves You” or “Please Please Me.”

But Trout Mask ain’t no copout: if you can dig this, you’re drinking the Beefheart Kool-Aid straight from the chalice. One angular time signature tumbles into the next with enough randomness to tie Dave Brubeck’s fingers in knots. As a rhythmic reference, think of a box of dishpans being spilled down the stairs to the basement. Harmonically, you wonder whether if anyone in the studio was paying the slightest bit of attention to any other musician, there’s so much dissonance. Seriously, would it be too much if at least two players were playing in related keys? And then, in an instant, harmony, melody and rhythm all come together like three countercurrents suddenly resolving themselves. To the newcomer, those doses of the familiar and palatable are what make plausible the legend that Beef and his band spent a year practicing this clattering racket before committing it to a tape liberally spliced with non sequiturs like the one quoted above. Which is not to say that his verses are a refuge for making sense:

No more bridge from Tuesday t' Friday
Everybodies gone high society
Hope lost his head 'n got off on alligators
Somebodies leavin' peanuts on the curbins
For uh white elephant escaped from zoo with love
Goes t' show what uh moon can do

- Moonlight On Vermont

Edit1: Courtesy of "fattyjubbo" and the magic of YouTube, here's the Captain and the Magic Band performing "She's Too Much for My Mirror" and "My Human Gets Me Blues" in Belgium in 1969:

He came by his weirdness honestly. A Lester Bangs interview in the Village Voice from 1980 opens with a "highly urbane, slyly witty" dialog between the Captain and a gila monster:

“GRAAUUWWWKKK!” says the big slumbrous (sic) reptile, peering out its laser-green lidless bulging eyes and missing nothing.

“Brickbats fly my fireplace,” answers Van Vliet. “Upside down I see them in the fire. The squeak and roast there. Wings leap across the floor.”

“KRAAUUAUUWWWKKK!” advises the heat-resistant gila. Van Vliet the Captain nods and ponders the efficacy of such a course.

But you don’t stake a career on being weird. You don’t suffer just for the sake of being weird. You don’t live with your wife in a trailer in the desert in order to afford the luxury of being as weird as you can possibly be. Or, then again, maybe that’s exactly what you do.

Edit2: Courtesy of “crushingdeath” and YouTube, here's an interview with the Captain on Letterman where he discusses, among other things, his formal schooling, which entailed about a half-day's worth of kindergarten:

Regardless, “weird” is a completely subjective description. From an artist’s perspective, the site of the rest of us careerists all working furiously to make commodities of ourselves surely must seem weird. And “weird” isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just problematic for the rest of us, like a streaker at High Mass.

Presumably, when you’ve had your moment of clarity and decided that anything is better than being a commodity, you start to welcome the weird. Embrace it, bring it into your home and make it your mantle. And maybe, when you’ve turned that corner, that’s when a goose squawking sounds more beautiful to you than Miles Davis’ solo in “Concierto De Aranjuen,” because the former is a truly ego-less expression, rather than a performance.

If there’s a hint of elitism in what I’ve just written, I want to dispel it, at least as it relates to Beefheart. I don’t think of his music as insular or as an expression of indifference to his audience. Both Beefheart and the goose are squawking, first and foremost, because they want to be heard. Whether the subsequent intention is to provoke, offend, annoy or inspire is secondary and has as much to do with the audience’s interpretation as it does the artist’s intention.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.

- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Consider Trout Mask a 28-song yawp, although Beefheart had more yawping to do, under outré titles such as Lick My Decals Off, Baby and Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller). Is yawping music? Hell, I don’t know. I’m not even sure that acknowledging Beefheart’s yawp is the same thing as getting his music.

And I’m not sure there’s anything to get. In Zen scriptures, there’s a story of a master who is confronted by a monk on the subject of living in accord with the Tao. The master simply pulls the monk’s nose and laughs out loud. Suddenness, unpredictability and unending change: All of the analysis and doctrine in the world isn’t going to help you get your fingerprints on those elements. The moment simultaneously arrives and passes, like the trout effortlessly squirming through my hands. As with Beefheart's music, there is no getting it.

A Plantation on the Plains?

2006-07-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

To the uninitiated, college football comes in three seasons. The first, which everyone knows about, runs from roughly Labor Day to New Years and is when the games are played. Sane people with lives to live should only concern themselves with this one.

A sub-strata of adherents follow the second season, recruiting season, which really never ends although the February signing day is generally regarded as the point at which the cycle ends and commences. Although hardly a perfect correlation, recruiting success tends to lead to on-the-field success, so some attention to this area is justifiable although not the amount that has become the underpinning of the booming recruiting media business enjoyed by the likes of Scout.com and Rivals.com.

Then there’s the season we’re in now: The off-season, which is technically a non-season. No practices are allowed and whatever workouts are going on are informal, organized by the players. There’s some recruiting going on and, if there’s good news to be had during this season, there’s the source.

However, because it is also a time the post-teen jock mercenaries that represent each school are essentially left to their own devices, this is also the scandal season. Most of the incidents that result in suspensions and expulsions tend to occur in the dog days of summer, so the sub-sub-strata of fans that follows the sport during this time of year is listening out for bad news and hoping like hell they don’t hear any.

If you were following Auburn this summer, your hopes got dashed in a pretty emphatic way, in the form of a four-page expose on the cover of the New York Times’ July 14 edition. Quoting a long list of professors and players, the Times documented a system in which 18 players from the undefeated 2004 team, including first-round draft pick Carnell “Cadillac” Williams, were steered to earn 97 hours’ course credit from apparently bogus directed study sociology courses taught by Thomas Petee, the sociology department’s highest-ranking member. In one semester, Dr. Petee reportedly taught 152 independent study classes, the workload of 3.67 professors. By other professor’s accounts, Petee would have had to get by on less than 15 seconds’ sleep a day and possess the ability to stop time in order to carry this load.

Athletic overemphasis has beleaguered Auburn’s academics before, jeopardizing the school’s accreditation. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), which placed Auburn on one- year probation in 2003, plans to speak with the university early next week. SACS is Auburn’s accrediting body and cleared the school in December 2005.

“I think it merits talking with them,” Jack Allen, vice president of the Commission on Colleges at SACS told the Birmingham News. “We’re perfectly willing to investigate these things when they are accreditation-related. Certainly, if the alegations are correct, then there is an academic problem.”

The Times article brims with unseemly nuggets, such as the presence in Petee’s office of a football autographed by Williams. (“To be honest with you, if they think that’s a problem, they need to investigate all the teachers at Auburn,” Williams told the Times.) As of this writing, similar balls are fetching nearly $300 on eBay. Two-thirds of the way into a semester, defensive end and junior college transfer Doug Langenfeld transferred into Petee’s class and managed to get a “B.” The Times reported the players received 81.1 percent A’s in the first semester of 2004-05, and 40.9 percent A’s after a colleague confronted Petee.

There’s much more and, if you’ve followed this post this far, you may as well indulge your inner Jerry Springer all the way by hitting the first link.

Some background: to get a handle on programs that were fast becoming football factories and restore the veneer that its members have at least a passing commitment to the “student” side of the term “student-athlete,” the NCAA devised the academic progress rate (APR) metric in 2003. Programs that fall below a certain number face penalties.

Auburn, as its coach Tommy Tuberville has happily pointed out to every recruit and sportswriter within yelling distance, has the fourth highest APR of all college football teams in Div 1 and Div 1-AA. Auburn trails only Stanford, the US Naval Academy and Boston College in this category and leads Duke, surely marking the first instance ever of Auburn finding its name in the same sentence as any of those programs.

Unlike those programs and unlike dozens of programs with even lower APRs, Auburn manages to graduate less than half its football players, which, sadly, is a bit closer to par for the course in the Southeastern Conference (exclusive of Vanderbilt, naturally).

At this point, anyone with 20 neurons working simultaneously should find himself reeling from quite a clangorous bit of cognitive dissonance: If Auburn’s players are making such excellent academic progress, why are so few progressing to the finish line? The NFL can’t possibly be drafting half of each of Auburn’s classes, so what happens? Alien abductions?

Let’s step back, take a deep breath and get some perspective. Yes, the Auburn football team is probably one of a hundred-odd NFL farm clubs masquerading as a collection of exceptionally talented student-athletes. If Auburn’s sociology department is, as one of its professors claim, “a dumping ground for athletes,” it was hardly the only sociology program in the country to attain such status.

My alma mater took the fall a few years ago when it surfaced that basketball players were taking a PE class taught by their assistant coach, Jim Harrick Jr. Aside from scaling what should have been a towering Chinese wall between academics and athletics, Harrick infamously administered tests that featured such brain-busters as “How many points are in a three-point basket?”

In its best Jerry “I have siiiiiiiiiiinnned” Falwell impersonation, the University of Georgia threw itself wailing and prostrate at the feet of the NCAA, cancelling the season for a team that likely would have reached the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament and vacating all of the wins it had earned up until that point. Georgia also sacrificed some scholarships, fired the coaching staff (an already scandal-plagued bunch from their prior employment and whom most Georgia fans readily admit should never have been hired), and probably would have donkey-punched itself in the nuts a dozen times had someone from the NCAA not stepped in and said, “Peace, child. Enough.”

Another SEC institution, the University of Tennessee, was exposed for having its athletes enrolled in classes in advanced chair-stacking and walking, for which attendance was not required and for which several players managed to get their failing grades (how on earth does a supposed athlete fail at walking?) changed at several times the frequency that non-athletes did. But, because no coach was involved in the classes, UT asserted “academic independence,” better known as a school’s right to maintain the academic rigors of Romper Room and thus suffered no consequences at the NCAA’s hands.

When we consider these cases, it’s important to consider the tortured position of the NCAA, which, in attempting to prosecute its members, is akin to the New York Stock Exchange attempting to prosecute corporate fraud. Both the NCAA and the NYSE have a financial interest in their members’ viability and thus a disincentive to cut anyone’s knees out. On the corporate side, that’s why we have the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Treasury Department to play bad cop. On the college sports side, we have … uh, well, all we have is the NCAA, unless Congress isn’t already preoccupied with steroids in baseball.

Should the NCAA get involved with what’s going on in Auburn? Probably. Kyle sure thinks so. Certainly, the disparity between the school’s APR and its graduation rate demands a much closer look. Will it? Probably not. If there’s a way for the NCAA to conclude that the irregularities at Auburn fall strictly on the academic side, it will conclude that it has no jurisdiction.

And that’s hardly the optimal outcome if you’re an Auburn alum, for whom the bigger concern should be that of the SACS getting involved again. Because, if we agree there’s a problem and the NCAA says it’s not their problem, then whose problem is it? That would make it the SACS’ problem, although the NCAA’s involvement wouldn’t necessarily negate the SACS joining the fray anyway. Auburn losing its accreditation over this might seem comical to some Alabama fans, but it would be a major setback to the state, as Auburn, with 23,000 students, is clearly a flagship school for the state.

Come on offa that cash pile, Damon!

2006-04-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

It’s been reported that my undergraduate alma mater’s fabulously profitable athletic department is, in fact, the country’s most profitable, according to US Department of Education statistics. Led by new director Damon Evans (above), the University of Georgia athletics department posted an operating profit (actually, EBITDA – earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $23.9M on revenues of $68.8M. After those deductions, the UGA AD netted $18M.

By comparison, the (distant) number two program was the University of Michigan’s, which rang in $17.1M, although its revenues were $10M greater than Georgia’s. The Atlanta Falcons, which pays its players, but which also doesn’t have the burdens of funding a dozen-odd other money-losing sports or of servicing debt on facilities construction (thanks, taxpayers), had $26.8M in EBITDA on $168M revenues. The University of Texas, whence I earned my graduate degree, and which has 20,000 more students than Georgia and yet three fewer varsity sports, posted $15.3M EBITDA on $89.7M revenues.

To put it in another context, the UGA AD’s operating profit is roughly equal to 5% of the University of Georgia’s relatively paltry $517M endowment, which ranks 103^rd in the country.

While my fandom of Georgia athletics is rarely anything less than rabid, seeing Bulldog sports that far in the black actually makes me see some red, and not Georgia red. And no, I’m not pinko either – there’s barely a year’s worth of dust on my MBA. Next to positive cash flow, profits make me happy, particularly when they’re being churned out by an enterprise in which I hold an equity stake.

But the UGA AD doesn’t have shareholders. It has donors, none of whom, so far as I am aware, are paid dividends, in spite of being shaken down for ever-escalating “donations” for season tickets and in spite of suffering ever-withering tailgating privileges. To these people, the UGA AD's Big Oil-rivaling profit margins aren't a point of pride; they're a slap in the face.

Georgia’s 35% operating margin (a breathtaking 53% return on its expenditures), is nearly double that of the NFL’s most profitable franchise, the Washington Redskins, which raked in $53.8M on sales of $287M. And that would be super if the UGA athletics department were a private sector enterprise whose managers had a fiduciary responsibility to run the most profitable organization possible.

But it isn’t.

The department’s mission, per its web site, is “to offer nationally competitive intercollegiate athletic programs, which reflect the interests of our students and faculty, the Southeastern Conference, and the people of Georgia and of the nation, who support our activities.” There’s more, but anyone looking for verbiage such as “sustaining Microsoft-level operating margins” will go wanting.

Still, if you measure “nationally competitive intercollegiate athletic programs” in Directors’ Cup rankings, you could make a case that the UGA AD is executing on its mission. Georgia ranked 7^th in 2004-5, 5^th in 2003-4, 15^th in 2002-3, 8^th in 2001-2, and 3^rd in 2000-1. Notwithstanding our red-headed stepchild treatment of basketball, it’s damned hard to find something to complain about with the way most of Georgia’s teams compete.

But piling up cash for the sake of piling up cash is pointless. When you have the goods, also have the knowledge of how and when to exploit them fully.

The Georgia football team has always carried the UGA AD on its back (this year, to the tune of $38.4M EBITDA on $50.9M revenues – a stupefying 75% op margin). It is unquestionably the school's most visible athletic enterprise and, as such, its formidable success has overshadowed the dominance of Georgia's gymnastics, tennis, golf and equestrian programs. Maddeningly, it has also done so almost exclusively east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mason-Dixon line, at least during the regular season.

If our mission is national competitiveness, such regional insularity by our most prominent athletic team is wildly inconsistent and is sorely disappointing to out-of-region alums like me. Sure, we’ve been constrained by having to play Florida every year on a neutral site in Jacksonville and by having to play an out-of-conference, in-state rival every year, (although I’m beginning to question how rivalrous our rivalry with Georgia Tech really is these days). But we’re only now deigning to take regular season non-conference roadtrips to someplace more exotic than the other side of Lake Hartwell.

Since Georgia’s last regular season trip out of the Southeast, man took his first steps on the moon, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Oval Office has had eight occupants and Bobby Bowden has taken Florida State to national prominence by hauling the former women’s college’s football team all over the country to take on all comers.

For more on this, please refer to T. Kyle King’s eminently worthy Movement, in which the Bulldog blogosphere’s most erudite scribe advocates a home-and-home with Michigan. Personally, I’d love to see something similar with Texas. As evidenced by their series with Ohio State and in spite of their neutral site game with Oklahoma in Dallas, the Longhorns have shown the "have cash, will travel" disposition that I hope will soon take hold in the Butts-Mehre building, especially in the era of a 12-game regular season.

Meanwhile, our basketball team plays in a coliseum that was designed by the Jetsons’ architect. A facelift by Mike Brady would qualify as modernization. In the interests of portfolio diversification and particularly given the basketball success of so-called football schools such as Florida, LSU and Texas, a sustained commitment to men's hoops, our only other profitable sport, is long overdue. The addition of a practice annex to the Stegasaurus is encouraging, but time will tell if it's just another bone the AD has infrequently tossed at hoops throughout its Ike-and-Tina relationship with the sport.

We have a varsity women’s soccer team and at least a dozen intramural men’s teams, but no varsity equivalent. The sport of lacrosse has caught fire in the sunbelt, with dozens of high school teams budding in Georgia. As a former player (attack and midi), I’d love to see Georgia field varisty men’s and women’s lacrosse teams, although I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a club ball player at Georgia.

Outside of reinvesting in sports, how about giving back to the entities who fertilized this money tree? Perhaps a nice gift to the school or, for the unfailingly generous and unceasingly beleaguered fans who will be asked to tailgate in Winder next year, how about a proper tailgating village, a sort of Grove on steroids?

Anyway, by now, you should have gotten my point. For the dim, it is this: cash is not its own end for a quasi-public enterprise like the UGA athletic department. It is a means. Deploy it, Damon.

Life is Difficult. Work is a Mess.

2006-03-02T08:25:00.000-08:00

The first line comes from M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. The second comes from a classical Tibetan Buddhist text called The Root Text of the Seven Points of Training the Mind and which I gleaned from Michael Carroll's Awake at Work.
The two sentences might initially strike you as pessimistic, but, upon reflection, I found a lot of wisdom in them. We have a tendency to go through life and work assuming that things mostly work in steady state, except for when something randomly unravels, causing us some suffering in life or some work to actually do when we're at work.
The reality is that there is no steady state. Loved ones die. Or miraculously get well. Valued customers cancel orders. Or double them. The unplanned is as likely to occur as the planned. Much of working and living -- or anything that requires a conscious mind -- entails dealing with things when they, for better or worse, go off the rails. Everything else is rest.
Currently, I'm trying to challenge myself to live in the present, as opposed to the past, the future or some idealized state of how things would be if all of life's current hassles would just resolve themselves without my involvement. In other words, to be here now.

24 is the new Coldplay: I’m over it.

2006-02-25T12:03:00.000-08:00

Might have been the medication, but I was home sick last night, watching 24, when this awful realization crept into my skull. Awful in the sense that it was a moment of clarity that formally identifies one of your vices as a vice (upgrading its status from “guilty pleasure”) and thus signals the beginning of the end of your relationship with it.

24 used to have a lot of mystique for me, because, when it debuted, it came on Tuesday nights, when I worked late, and so I’d have to get updates from my friends who thought it was The Crack. Eventually, it became my new X-Files – something that I paid a lot of attention to in spite of not knowing quite why.

Last night, the ring of truth landed on me the way it always does, with the subtlety of a flaming blimp crash: this show just ain’t that good. In fact, there’s the distinct possibility that this show sucks but people can't bring themselves to admit it.

Don’t get me wrong, the formula for success is there:

Ridiculously convoluted plot lines? Check.
Maddeningly complex relationships among characters? Roger.
Tied to an area in current events that scares the shit out of everyone? Yup.

And, unlike The West Wing or Grey’s Anatomy, 24's cast isn’t solely populated by unfailingly earnest characters. (Really, think about Josh, Leo, Toby, CJ et al. Ever see any one of them consider a bribe, display a whiff of apathy or otherwise lean towards doing the wrong thing? Hell, no! They’re doing The People’s Business! They care too much to bother with graft, fraud, corruption, ineptitude or not giving a shit! Pittance salaries of public servants be damned!)

To that end, 24 is like the West Wing on meth: lots of really good-looking, stressed out people running around and cutting each other’s knees out, either to prevent or hasten something catastrophic. And every season 24 comes with the guarantee that at least one person is on two payrolls. And that’s good, right? Everyone needs a Nina Myers to stoke whatever paranoia isn’t already stoked by the prospect of terrorists leaking sarin gas in a crowded mall or glassing Los Angeles County. And then there’s Jack Bauer, who unexplainably has been anointed this decade’s de facto badass, with various fact lists comparing him to Chuck Norris. From what I’ve seen, the comparison ought to be with Harrison Ford. Every action movie that features Harrison Ford also features Harrison Ford getting his ass kicked. Similarly, no episode of 24 is complete without Bauer getting the business end of an ass-kicking or three. We all know what Chuck Norris would recommend: Learn to roundhouse kick.

Ever see Chuck Norris do this?

By the way, has no one noticed how bad the dialog is? I know that’s kind of film school of me, but I didn’t go to film school and don’t profess to know a damn thing about what makes a good movie good. So if I’m noticing the problem, it really must be a gaping wound. Witness:

Jack Bauer: You're a good liar. But I've seen better.

Sure, dialog takes a back seat to action. But, if I’m supposed to get involved with these people’s development over 24 episodes, I expect a little more in this department. The running assumption among producers seems to be that, if the actor’s eyes are sufficiently bugged out and his/her brow is convincingly wrinkled, even ‘80s porno lines will sound compelling. Which perhaps sheds new light on cocaine’s role in pornography, but I digress.
24 got a lot of attaboys for not letting political correctness influence the depiction of terrorists, although it doesn’t look like the writers let pesky research get in their way either. And, gee, imagine going out on a limb for a season and having terrorists who happen to be from – you better sit down for this – the Middle East. Such boldness aside, your typical 24 terrorist group is distinctly multi-cultural, in marked contrast to the incestuously mono-cultural Islamo-fascists and white supremacists who normally busy themselves with plans for Western annihilation.
In the first season, the terrorists were Eastern Europeans. In the second season, we got Turkish(!) terrorists whose mother tongue inexplicably was Arabic. Of course, the conspirators were rich white oil execs, which is a unique pairing when you consider that, in a good year, Turkey supplies about 0.092% of all the oil consumed in the US. That’s ninety-two thousandths of a percent, folks. We get more oil from friggin’ Denmark.
In the third season, it’s a disgruntled white soldier with some Mexican drug lords thrown in. It’s not until the fourth season that the primary terrorist is Arab, and even then, he has white and Chinese people working for him.Anyway, I'm sure this rant has probably said a lot more about me than it has about the show and I'm sorry if I ruined it for any of you. (Well, not really. Grow a damn spine and like what you like for your own reasons.)

Shalom, bitches!

2006-02-25T09:04:00.001-08:00

I can't quit you, baby. So I had to put you down for awhile.
- Willie Dixon

So here's the gig. When I sold out to The Man, I agreed to restrict my digital music musings on the Digital Music Blog. Likewise, anything about Google, Yahoo! and peer-to-peer goes to its respective home at Weblogs Inc.

But, either out of a need to diversify or driven by ADD, I needed another outlet for my ramblings, so I've come crawling back, with hat in hand and a crocodile tear in the eye.

Bottled Blues will be my gonzo joint, a virtual Woody Creek to which I'll periodically decamp and take aim at all the bats on my dashboard, real or otherwise. I could speculate about what's coming next, but I don't want to make promises I can't keep so I'll leave it at this: when I come across something weird, brilliant or galatically stupid, I'll probably give it an airing here, unless it overlaps with the aforementioned blogs. In the spirit of taking liberties (and I plan to take a few as I toss off the shackles of journalistic convention), the language may be saltier, the post rate may be less predictable and the focus will definitely be out the window, but, regardless, I promise to make it interesting.

Digital Dharma is dead! Long Live Digital Dharma!

2005-12-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

Call it syndication or selling out to The Man.
Weblogs, Inc., an AOL property, has graciously brought me on as a contributing blogger for its Digital Music, Unofficial Google and Unofficial Yahoo! blog channels. Read more about it here.
As part of the deal, Digital Dharma will be shutting down (cue the lone drunk at the back of the bar clapping once before falling out of his chair).
So, thanks dear readers for your time and attention, and please join me over on the Weblogs sites.
Cheers,
Tommy

Mobile Communities

2005-09-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

I have a natural bias towards community building, particularly in the virtual space. People are inherently social creatures and we use the web to connect with one another and trade information. Content is the one of the dominant currencies for this exchange. (And no, I'm not pretending that any the preceding bears the faintest trace of original thought.)

So, when Apple took the lid off of one of the worst-kept secrets in technology this week about the launch of the iTunes-enabled ROKR E1 phone and the iPod Nano, I confess to having expected more.

What’s really new here? That music is being digitized and made portable on smaller and smaller devices? Certainly not. Is it that music is moving towards distribution via wireless networks? Not really. People have been downloading ringtones, games and other forms of content onto their phones for awhile now. Satellite radio has been available on portable devices for several years.

So what we have with yesterday’s announcement is another pair of devices that give individual consumers another one-way interaction with a centralized content source. And that is no longer “breathtaking,” to borrow Steve Jobs’ description of the Nano.

Smaller size and new features aside, the only thing that is fundamentally different about the iTunes-iPod model since its launch is the introduction of the Podcast, which was not an Apple innovation.

The genius of the Podcast is that it allows consumers to use Apple’s iPod-iTunes platform as the foundation for connecting with one another, sharing preferences and building a community. The format allows users to publicly recognize content they believe is worthy and to be creative about how they do so.

By featuring Podcasts, the iTunes interface advanced on the web browser as an essential tool with which consumers interact with other consumers via the World Wide Web. In essence, it was a step from B2C to C2C, or C2B2C. Such steps are what allow companies such as eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon.com gain strangleholds over their markets and preserve margins.

In light of the cult that comprises much of Apple’s consumer base, I’m certainly not suggesting that Apple doesn’t appreciate communities. The conundrum Apple faces is that the iPod is anything but a social tool. If it were, perhaps they’d call it a wePod. As it stands, white earbuds have become the universal signal for one tuning out the world. The challenge to Apple is, now that there’s a large base of iPod owners out there, what will it take to get these people interacting on the basis of their iPod ownership? If p2p is a dirty term, then how about pod2pod?

The ROKR E1 is a potential answer to this challenge, but not in its current architecture. Presently, this is an iPod that you can talk on. (As an aside, I wonder what the airlines think of this. Can you have the music function on and the phone part disabled?) I’m sure that, in future iterations, that you will be able to download directly to the phone, rather than having to connect it to your computer. But the elephant in the living room is this: Phones’ fundamental functionality is p2p. We use them to engage the world, rather than to wall ourselves off from it.

And music doesn’t have to be wall. It can be a bridge. For example, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to listen to the music or podcasts of everyone on your call list or of every ROKR E1 owner in the vicinity? Or to view the video content of the same groups? Think about the kind of discovery (read: sales) that could be facilitated by such a model.

It’s not just music, as many Podcasts contain little to no music. When you connect the dots among blogs, podcasts and camera phones, you see that there is a new New Journalism evolving, where users are becoming citizen journalists, using interactive devices and media to paste together collages of text, video and audio to share with whoever is logged on. Devices such as the ROKR possess a unique capacity for producing, distributing and receiving such user-developed content. If Apple can look beyond the short-term goal of hooking users on the Apple interface, Apple could position itself as the nexus for such sharing.

Goin' Mobile

2005-08-30T18:55:00.000-07:00

Several developments this week gave us the best glimpse yet of how quickly digital music is going mobile – or, more specifically, cellular.

The first was a deal between major label Sony BMG and mobile phone network 3 to sell music to mobile phones. According to The Guardian, “The move is yet another attempt by an operator to persuade customers to do more with their phones than just talk and send texts. It also represents part of the industry’s efforts to turn mobile phones into digital music players and usurp gadgets such as the iPod.”

Analysts are predicting that mobile phone music downloads will overtake computer-based digital music services.

Perhaps hedging its bets, Apple is apparently set to launch a cell phone through Cingular Wireless and manufactured by Motorola that can play iTunes music, Ovum research analyst Roger Entner told the Associated Press.

It’s not known whether the new phone will allow users to download music directly over a cellular Internet connection or if users would be forced to download songs to a computer and then transfer them to the device.

As low-power, dual-core “cool” chips proliferate, there’s little doubt that mobile phones will be able to juggle the duties of an iPod and a Treo and increasing hope that their batteries can supply the energy demanded by such functionality.

Either discouraged by this trend or finally conceding its battle with the iPod, D&M Holdings, Inc., maker of Rio, the first digital music player, is getting out of the game, effective Sept. 30. D&M says the mass-market portable digital music player didn’t fit with its strategy of premium electronics brands, which include Denon, Marantz and McIntosh. Last month, it sold some mp3 player assets to chip maker SigmaTel.

The company blames the Rio for its losses, which widened to ¥717 million for the quarter ending June 30 from ¥530 million for the same quarter a year ago. Over the same period, sales fell to ¥18.75 billion from ¥19.22 billion.

Meanwhile, back on the services ranch, research firm Parks Associates released a study that concluded that 41% of people with digital music players are unwilling to pay more than $10 a month to listen to music. Yahoo charges $60 a year or $10 a month, while rivals Napster and Real Networks charge $14.95 a month.

“Companies like Yahoo! can afford to keep the price low because they have other revenue streams to subsidize their music services,” Parks analyst Harry Wang told TechWeb. “Pure-plays like Napster may not be able to lower their prices.”

Perhaps not, but, assuming Napster and Yahoo!’s music services are working on similar cost structures, I’d be curious to see how long Yahoo! would or could subsidize a business whose margins are, Wang implies, low to non-existent.

Subscription services may bear out Parks’ Parks’ $10 per month per consumer metric, but a la carte sales fall far shy of this number. Using Parks’ number, we would expect iPod owners (who account for 80% of all digital music player owners) to buy about 12 albums apiece this year on iTunes ($10/month --> 10 songs --> 1 album/month or 12 albums/year). With iPod sales at 20 million so far, that would put iTunes’ gross at $240 million for the year.

As it stands, with iTunes’ sales at $500 million since its inception, Apple has sold an average of 25 songs per iPod owner, grossing $24.75 per owner and netting $8.66 (if we assume the 65% payout to labels that iTunes was paying until last month).

Unwinding iTunes/iPod, pt. 2

2005-08-23T20:40:00.000-07:00

This Reuters story touches on issues I addressed last month (“Should Apple open its music format”), albeit from the perspective of content owners, rather than from Apple’s.

Essentially, record labels are chafing under the lock-in between iTunes and iPod, which prevents owners of the dominant music player from playing songs downloaded from services other than iTunes.

Reuters says that Apple commands 80% of the MP3 player market and 75% of online music sales. Industry analysts doubt that iTunes can sustain that kind of dominance and label execs worry that the music service cannot, by itself, carry digital music sales to the desired 25% of overall music sales by 2009. Piper Jaffray estimates that only nine tracks are bought per month per iPod user.

So the labels want Apple to un-bundle iTunes and iPod, to level the playing field for other music services. In a sense, iPod’s dominance gives iTunes a near-monopolistic advantage over its competitors. Apple, it seems, isn’t budging.

“It's a monologue with them,” Reuters quotes one unnamed label executive. “They pretty much say, ‘This is what we want to do,’ and if you disagree with them you’re an idiot. It’s like dealing with a cult.”

Reading between the lines, it’s easy to sympathize with both sides. If you’re a label, you want enough diversity among your retailers so that none has the leverage over you that Apple currently has over the labels.

Conversely, asking Apple to unwind iPod and iTunes is like asking Gillette to make razors that work with blades made by Schick or asking Hewlett-Packard to make printers that accept ink cartridges made by Dell.

Pending the re-launch of Connect, Sony will be one of very few companies with a hardware/service combo to compete with Apple’s. But as long as Sony’s music files rely on Microsoft’s Windows Media (.wma) file format, Sony won’t have the barrier to entry (in the form of a proprietary file format) that Apple enjoys with AAC++. Instead, Sony’s files can be supported on non-Sony devices and its device will support non-Connect files.

Absent some sort of incentives from content holders to induce Apple to unwind iTunes/iPod, there’s always hardball. Already bothered about perceived inflexibility on track pricing and promotions, labels could withhold content from Apple or give better terms to Apple competitors such as Sony, which, conveniently, is also a content owner.

Technology journalist Sandy Murray has posted an interesting piece on Corante.com that offers several strong rebuttals to the labels’ demands.

“If iPods supported secure Windows Media files, it would doom the AAC file format and place Microsoft in the driver’s seat,” Murray writes. “Do label executives really think they would be better off if Microsoft was the dominant player in music downloads?”

Murray is also bearish about Sony’s chances:

“Sony can’t control the market as long as the Connect store relies on Microsoft's Windows Media file format,” he says.

Is Google being out-Froogled?

2005-08-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

I guess we should’ve seen this coming from a mile away: Audio search engines.

Just recently, Yahoo! launched a beta version of its Audio Search, which allows you to search for music, podcasts, sound effects, interviews, e-Books and speeches. After it returns an index of services that sell the file you’ve searched for, you click “download” and are immediately directed to the web page from which you can download the track. The index tells you what formats, platforms and prices go with each service, as well as whether you can copy or burn a file from each service.

Mp3.com offers a similar service that directs you to downloads and streams and tells you what format each service uses and whether the service uses digital rights management (DRM).

Conspicuously absent is Google, whose labs page only lists a video search as the nearest competitor to Mp3.com’s and Yahoo!’s offerings. You’ve gotta think that an audio search is certainly under development in Mountain View, particularly given Google’s products for mobile devices.

Froogle is the classic example of Google using its technology to disintermediate markets for physical goods. It’s also the model for what Yahoo! and Mp3.com are doing for content markets such as iTunes, Audible, the New York Times, Audible, etc.

iTunes increases wholesale payout for Independents

2005-07-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

As I was researching iTunes’ margins for yesterday’s post, I stumbled across this interesting tidbit from Digital Music News. iTunes has increased its payout to independent labels from 65 cents to 70 cents on a 99-cent download. That doesn’t account for the fee collected by content aggregators, who are the primary channel through which most indies deal with iTunes.

Still, there’s a number of ways to read this development. iTunes is in an increasingly competitive situation and has the economic benefit of large and increasing volumes being spread across its fixed costs. That means an increase in its variable costs could be offset by gains in its operating margins. In other words, it’s the old “we’ll make it up on volume” strategy, minus the inventory baggage that dooms this strategy in the physical world.

The hard-core capitalists among us are bound to ask, “If sales are doing so well and you’re maintaining a dominant market share, why are you giving up margin instead of taking more of it?”

One answer: to starve existing competitors and to discourage new entrants. If iTunes pays out 70 cents, rightsholders will demand the same payout from iTunes competitors. Apple could be betting that such a payout will hurt its competitors more than it will hurt iTunes. And, given the arms race among major services to have the most comprehensive catalogs in digital music, it’s not as if a service can easily afford to pass on a deal.

Of course, the flipside is that iTunes may not have had a choice. With new services jumping into the market and Yahoo! signing partnerships with universities, wireless carriers and, most recently, satellite radio, perhaps this concession to labels indicates a realization by iTunes that it must take its competition much more seriously.

Should Apple open its music format?

2005-07-28T15:34:00.000-07:00

This question comes up fairly frequently and usually accompanies every report on the latest growth rate of the digital music market. Apple’s failure to open its operating system is widely cited as the reason it lost the personal computing market to Windows-based PCs. Given the close relationship between iTunes and iPod, many pundits wonder if Apple is in the process of making the same mistake and expecting different results.

Here’s the quandary: Apple’s proprietary music format, AAC++, is sold only on iTunes. Those files must be converted to an format such as MP3 or WAV to play on something besides iPods, which remain far and away the dominant portable music player. Aside from open formats such as MP3 and WAV, the iPod plays no other file format.

Should Apple open the iPod to accept formats from services such as Rhapsody, Napster and others? Should iTunes open its file format to non-iPod markets?

iPods account for 92.1% of market for the hard-drive-based players, according to the NPD Group. But cheaper, flash-based music players have streamed in from all corners, leaving the iPod with a 30.2% share of the overall digital music player market. Meanwhile, the number of music services has tripled in the past year to 300. Each new competitor’s entry in the market gets splashy coverage by the domestic and international business and technology media, whose hype machines have been largely dormant since the dot-com bust of 2001.

Sales of iPods are driving sales for iTunes (and vice-versa) and there’s a not-to-distant relationship between iPod/iTunes and overall sales for Macs, the market share for which grew 34.8% to 2.5% overall in Q2 of 2005. That puts Apple in eighth place behind Dell, HP, Gateway and others.

Loren Loverde, director of IDC's Worldwide PC Tracker Program, told The Mac Observer:

“It seems they are seeing some real connection between the success of their online music business and the iPod and their PC business,” he commented. “It's hard to make that statement conclusively, but just based on the publicity that they've received from the music sector and the change in growth over the last couple of quarters, which has been quiet remarkable, it seems to coincide pretty well with the visibility of the music business. I think it's safe to say that there is some element of a halo affect.”

Let’s give it a quick Michael Porter test:

Supplier Power: Given how completely iPod dominates the hard-drive-based market and iTunes’ towering sales, it’s hard to imagine that Apple is under the thumb of either hardware or content providers, although Apple’s deal with Intel could shift some of that leverage away from Apple. The current iPods use an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, but we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line. Content owners, particularly major labels, claim to have been mortally wounded by file-sharing and piracy and thus are violently opposed to any format that lacks digital rights management and any format that lends itself to use on multiple devices (read: copying) makes them nervous. But, if anyone has exhibited leverage over content owners, it’s been Steve Jobs.
Barriers to Entry: Not applicable. Not only has Apple entered the digital music and music player markets, it dominates them.
Threat of substitutes: Sky-high. I’m not positing that Apple will succumb to them, but, with 300 music services and almost as many digital music players on the market (almost all of which are cheaper than their Apple counterparts), there doesn’t seem to be much to debate here.
Buyer power: From a wholesale perspective, Apple’s eponymous retail channel is pretty good hedge in the event that relationships with other retailers of Apple products such as HP (whoops, not anymore, according to the WSJ) and Amazon go south. The bigger risk is with consumers, who face no shortage of substitutes (see above). Aside from adding a photo component and a U2 version, Apple hasn’t really introduced features or versions that aren’t already out there. The average price of a 20-gig digital music player is being driven down by Dell, Creative and a host of new entrants. By offering the same thing as everyone else, Apple has only its sleek brand by which to justify the premium that consumers pay for iPods.
Rivalry: In terms of brand identity for digital music, Apple has a huge lead on its rivals that completely inverts the lead those rivals enjoy on Macs. As I mentioned, there aren’t many significant feature differences between their offerings, but each competitor’s closed format represents a barrier to entry for its rivals, notwithstanding Real’s efforts to sell music that plays on iPods.

Because iTunes is married to iPod and because both dominate their respective market, it’s not as if keeping the AAC++ format closed has represented much of a missed opportunity for Apple. If you’re an iPod owner, the only thing that would make you buy music anywhere but iTunes would be a service that offers cheaper files that still play on your iPod. If you're not an iPod owner, you can still convert iTunes files to play on your device.

In the eyes of Apple and its supporters, the iPod-iTunes relationship is akin to that of razors and razorblades or printers and ink cartridges. Conventional business wisdom avers that profits can only be preserved by maintaining the symbiosis between the two.

But what if a wedge gets driven into the iPod-iTunes relationship? What iPod starts losing share? Should iTunes address markets outside of iPod owners? Such a move would certainly orphan the iPod, although it would add value to an iTunes music file for which iTunes could charge a premium. That could stave off some of the commoditization of digital music, although, by making iTunes files directly playable on other devices, the iPod would be exposed to further price pressure.

But iPods add hundreds of millions to Apple’s top line, while iTunes has only contributed millions. Until something reverses that dynamic, it would be awfully hard for Apple to justify cutting out the knees of its largest absolute source of profitability and revenue growth.

iTunes collects 29 cents on a 99-cent download and is said to have 20% gross margins and 5-7.5% operating margins. Still, iTunes’ surging sales are expected to boost those margins as fixed costs are spread across increasing volumes, while operating margins on iPods are expected to fall below 10%. I suspect they could fall further as Apple gets squeezed between the price pressure and the supplier power wielded by Intel.

In the meantime, opening the AAC++ file format would only accelerate the inevitable. Apple should wring out as much profitability as it can from the iPod until profits from iPods and iTunes reach an inflection point. Only if such a point seems imminent (and that’s a big “if”) should Apple consider opening its music format.

Opening the iPod is a different matter. Apple has repeatedly slashed prices on the device and will likely do so again. It’s tempting to think that Apple’s brand can justify a premium for the device. But that same thinking is what cost the Mac almost all of its market share 20 years ago, when Apple’s refusal to license its operating system to other PC makers allowed Windows-powered PCs to flood the corporate, consumer and education markets.

Presently, iPod’s margins are under more pressure than its market share, although there's only so much margin Apple can cede before it loses share. Still, before it capitulates to accepting the file formats of iTunes’ competitors, it must look to other features to prop up the device’s margins. What features? That’s the topic of a later post, but battery life would certainly be at or near the top of my list.

Adding features could expose the iPod to broader competition from other handheld devices. To the extent that the iPod hems itself in from such competition or finds itself unable to compete, it may be time to consider opening the device to others services’ formats.

Similarly, if competitors such as Napster-to-Go showed they could consistently take share from iTunes, the iPod could be dragged down by iTunes. Blunting such an aftershock could require Apple to open the iPod to other services, as a turnkey device that plays other services' files would have more value to consumers in that context.

Legal Downloads Nearing a Tipping Point?

2005-07-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

A report from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries showed that legal, single track downloads for the first half of 2005, 180 million, topped the total for all of 2004, which ended at 157 million.

Of course, illegal downloads still dwarf the legal variety, yet they rose a relatively paltry 3% from 870 million in January to 900 million in June.

The IFPI’s factsheet suggests that consumers' fear of lawsuits and annoyance with adware, spyware and viruses have blunted the growth of illegal downloading. That may be true, but it seems a little early to claim victory over illegal downloading. 3% growth is also the historical growth rate of the US economy, which could indicate that p2p services are simply hitting maturity.

The fact that illegal and legal digital music delivery are both still growing indicates that the overall digital music pie is still growing and thus neither side can claim definitively to be taking market share from the other.

As BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland told TechNewsWorld:

"Ultimately, we have to bridge the gap. Subscriptions look like a winning model," he said. "But consumers in our focus groups said that although they welcome subscription models, they will not stop downloading free MP3s. So they are willing to pay for music, but they still consider swapping files an important part of the equation."

What I found remarkable was the growth of legal download services, which have tripled to 300 in the past year.

There had been some expectation that consolidation and attrition would whittle that number down, but a countervailing force is the room for differentiation that exists for services. While major services such as iTunes, Napster, Yahoo! and Real's Rhapsody tout the 1 million-plus tracks that each have in their catalogues, other services differentiate by focusing on specific types of music, such as Christian, Indian, Indie Rock, etc., or by focusing on larger or more open file formats, such as lossless (FLAC, WAV, etc.), MP3 and DRM-less.

Going forward, I’m keeping an eye on subscription rates. As consumers move from music collectors to music samplers, I expect subscription services to occupy a bigger piece of digital music’s revenue stream.

Subscriptions to digital services are up sharply so far in 2005, according to IFPI, with a total of 2.2 million people now subscribed to music services globally. This is up from 1.5 million subscriptions estimated in the group's Digital Music Report in January.

What about the (i)Tunes, man?

2005-07-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

In a report from today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Apple has recently held discussions with major recording companies, seeking to license music videos to sell through its iTunes Music Store.

Like many people who follow digital content distribution, I’ve suspected that iTunes, which just crossed the half-billion mark for track downloads, exists to push sales of iPods, which have produced over $1 billion in quarterly revenue for Apple since Q4 2004. And vice-versa. This move certainly seems designed to push further into the stratosphere sales of iPods.

On the surface, this venture would portend no major technology hurdle, as iTunes is built on QuickTime and its last two versions have featured video playback. Similarly, iPods are now equipped with color screens to show album art, photos, etc.

But I am deeply skeptical of the iPod’s chances as a video playback device, for the following reasons:

1. Battery life. If you keep the backlight off, play low bit-rate songs (128 kbps), don’t shuffle, don’t flip back to memory – basically, hit play and don’t touch the thing again – you might, might get 12 hours’ life out of a brand-new iPod battery. Last month, Apple had to settle a class action lawsuit related to battery failures of its earlier iPod models. Now they're going to launch an iPod with the battery capacity to play hours and hours of video content? Doubtful.

2. Screen size. As anyone in the mobile phone industry will attest, the public’s presumed appetite for video content on 2 inch by 2 inch screens is looking more and more like a marketing myth. There’s only a handful of types of content that people are willing to squint at a handheld device for longer than two seconds to consume. Maps, directions, events in my area? Yes. Movie trailers and music videos? Not that I watch either, but, if I did, why wouldn’t I do so on the larger screen that accompanies the device on which I downloaded such content to begin with?

3. Functionality. Sorta overlaps with #2, but think about what you do with an iPod. You shop, tap away on your laptop, exercise, drive, powerwalk through airports and train stations and a whole lot of other activities to which listening to your iPod takes a back seat in terms of being your primary focus.

Indeed, video seems like a questionable offering for a service called iTunes. So, if it’s inconsistent with the name of the service and it isn’t going to sell more iPods, why is Apple interested in it? Because large numbers of people have already shown that they want it so bad that they’re willing to download it illegally, as they did with music. And, as it did with music, Apple wants to show video content owners that it can be every bit the vigilant technology steward of intellectual property that it has been for audio content owners.

Some may scoff that Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management coding has been easily cracked by software such as PlayFair, Hymn (which succeeded PlayFair following a round of cease-and-desist letters from Apple’s lawyers), DeDRMS and FairKeys. But the relatively small, but savvy cohort that uses such programs hasn’t come close to neutralizing Apple’s prowess at monetizing once-free digitally distributed content.

So, once again, Apple is looking to the lawsuits for its next market and is now locking in on the crowd that currently must download The Matrix or the last season of 24, The Simpsons, etc. on BitTorrent.

Grokster Goes Down

2005-06-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

Betamax notwithstanding, I can’t say I’m too surprised by the news yesterday that the Supreme Court ruled against Grokster and StreamCast Networks -- the company behind the Morpheus network. Justices ruled that companies such as StreamCast can be held liable for copyright infringement if they encourage customers to illegally share copyright movies and music. The Supremes sent the case to district court, where Grokster and Streamcast will be tried for inducing infringement.

The test in this case was whether there were substantial non-infringing uses for Grokster/Streamcast’s technology. I’d say there certainly were – but Grokster and Streamcast certainly weren’t encouraging many of them. This may be oversimplifying things, but Grokster's business model is an advertising/subscription play, like any other dot-com venture. The carrot with which companies such as Grokster unabashedly lure their user base is free music.

I seriously doubt this ruling is the end of peer-to-peer. There’s something inherently democratic about file-sharing, which has done plenty to break up the death grip that Clear Channel, MTV and major labels have had on music promotion and distribution. As I said earlier, the only flaw in this model was the lack of a licensing or revenue sharing arrangement between the content owners and the distributors. That shortcoming hardly merits a dismantling of the whole enterprise, although I do think Grokster and its ilk should be compelled to augment their business models to include such arrangements.

There are plenty of companies – Weedshare and PassAlong Networks among them – who are proving out a peer-to-peer model that includes content owners. But I’m told that it’s way too easy to download a file-sharing source code, such as Gnucleus, re-skin it, adding place holders for advertising and thus launch a new p2p network.

This is Digital Music's Future?

2005-06-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

MusicGiants
Originally uploaded by Tommy Perkins.

So today I downloaded MusicGiants, which, according to Businessweek, might be “digital music’s future.” MusicGiants’ big selling point is that its downloads are “CD quality,” a term the company apparently does not view as oxymoronic. Kidding aside, songs ripped at 1100 kbps are certainly a step up in quality from the 128 kbps that most services, such as iTunes, Napster and Wal-Mart, offer.
MusicGiants’ offering is digital music for people who plan to listen to it through something more substantial than earbuds or factory-installed car stereos. As Ted Cohen, EMI’s Sr. VP for digital development and distribution told Businessweek, “They're addressing the biggest compromise that music fans have had to make: trading portability for quality. This solves that dilemma.” Songs cost $1.29, vs. 99 cents or less at most online sites. There's also a $50 annual membership fee (waived for anyone buying more than $250 worth of songs).
MusicGiants’ offering comes as both bandwidth and storage get bigger and cheaper and thus with the presumption that consumers are beginning an inevitable migration towards massive drives and even home entertainment servers from which they can pipe music all over their homes.
The company plans to sell a $9,500, 400-gigabyte device called the SoundVault that would sit in the stereo cabinet, just like a CD-player or receiver. (The package includes hardware, a high-end sound processing card, and networking gear.) That way, MusicGiants' customers could bypass their PCs and load songs directly into their living room stereo.

Some initial likes/dislikes:

1. Dislike: Files come in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. I’d prefer an open format, such as Fully Lossless Audio Compression (FLAC) or, frankly, any format that spares me the Apple-Microsoft pissing match. Indeed, the whole system is wired to Microsoft: it uses Windows Media Player 10 software and Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management. But the cult of Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model avers that hell will freeze over before labels and retailers agree to open formats, so thank God for dBpowerAMP. Then again, this is not music meant to be transferred to a variety of different players. It’s supposed to sit on a half-terabyte server and entertain guests in every room.

2. Like: Data comes from All Music Guide. I’ve heard people quibble about things like songwriting credits getting occasionally mixed up on AMG, but, on balance, AMG has the best combination of breadth and depth out there when it comes to music data.

3. Dislike: $50 registration fee. Call me a cheap bastard, but there’s something onerous about having to pay $50 just to have the right to buy music. That said, it’s basically a marketing inducement to go ahead and spend $250 to get the fee waived, which MusicGiants’ audiogeek demographic will have no trouble doing in under a year.

4. Like: 1100 kbps. Sure, a straight WAV file is over 1400 kbps, but that’s splitting hairs. If you really want the best sound and you can’t find the album on vinyl, shell out for DVD-Audio, SACD hybrid, etc.

5. Like: Elegant client. This is an entirely superficial assessment, as I haven’t had time to experiment with things like the playlists. My favorite iTunes feature is the ability to make “smart” playlists that evolve as your music collection changes, can be built using over a dozen different criteria and spare you the need to manually drag and drop songs and albums. Already, however, I’ve noticed that the software has forgotten my user name, although its memory of me might improve when/if I pony up the registration fee. Still, the client looks very easy to navigate and there’s something kind of old school about the “Fidelity Meter” and MusicGiants’ choice of phraseology such as “copy a CD,” as opposed to “ripping” one.

6. Dislike: Privacy/security clause in the end user license agreement (EULA). Oh, well, what else is new? If you don’t want to be seriously annoyed, don’t read these things. Herewith is the offending phrase:

“You agree that you alone [emphasis added] are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality and security of your account. … MusicGiants is not responsible for any losses arising out of the unauthorized use of your member name, password and/or account and you agree to indemnify and hold harmless MusicGiants, its partners, parents, subsidiaries, agents, affiliates and/or licensors, as applicable, for any improper, unauthorized or illegal uses of your account.”

Perhaps this language shows up in every EULA out there, but that’s cold comfort. After reading that, I wasn’t jumping over barrels to give these guys my credit card information.

7. Like: Initial bug fixes. Granted, this is sort of like patting someone on the back for molesting fewer children. But, given the rate at which crappy, beta software is unloaded on the unsuspecting public, I suppose it’s refreshing that MusicGiants was thoughtful enough to remove some of the glass shards from its product. Weeks ago, blogger Brad Hill endured aborted installations after getting the following messages during the installation phase: "MusicGiants optionally uses the Microsoft (R) .NET 1.1 Framework. Would you like to install it now?" and "During setup some third-party installers might be started. Please take care to follow their instructions." Yikes. I would imagine that the tweedy, non-tech-savvy audiophiles for whom this product is intended ran away screaming upon receiving such messages.

8. Like: "Complete Your Collection." Once you get your music loaded onto MusicGiants' library, you can click on this option. You'll be told how many of an artist's tracks you have in "hi-fidelity" (as in high bit rate) and low-fidelity, and you'll be given the option to buy every track you don't already have in one click. This may sound obsessive to some, but I suspect MusicGiants' target customer is obsessive by definition.

Linkin Park and the Warner Music Group IPO

2005-05-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

Linkin Park and the Warner Music Group IPO
Originally uploaded by Tommy Perkins.

A week ago, as Warner Music readied itself for its much-anticipated public offering, the beleaguered major label was broadsided by one of its top-grossing acts, rap metal band Linkin Park, who threatened to bolt the label.

Chief among the band’s gripes were that the label was not effectively marketing the band, which claims sales of 35 million records and 10% of Warner’s total sales in the past five years. Warner disputes that percentage, but the indisputable takeaway is that Linkin Park has been a major breadwinner for the label.

Warner expected the IPO to bring in $750 million, of which it would allocate $574 million to debt and $7 million to general operations. Unfortunately, Warner only managed to raise $554 million today, with the share price cut to from the planned range of $22-$24 down to $17.

According to Reuters, “a source familiar with the discussions said the public spat was a ploy by the band’s managers, The Firm, to renegotiate their contract and extract a $60 million advance ahead of the IPO. The source said the band also asked for 50 percent of profits.”

A May 2 press release from Linkin Park and The Firm, states: “The new owners of the Warner Music Group will be reaping a windfall of $1.4 billion from their $2.6 billion purchase a mere 18 months ago if their planned IPO moves forward. Linkin Park, their biggest act, will get nothing.”

Well, unless Linkin Park got stock options as part of its contract, I’m not sure why they would have a claim on the proceeds of an IPO. The band’s statement presumes that the reader believes bands are awarded their budgets based on past, rather than expected, performance. And if that resonates with their fans, as I suspect it does, then good for them, although the implication is less than genuine.

The release goes on to quote music industry attorney Peter Paterno, who represents artists such as Dr. Dre, Pearl Jam and Warner Music’s Metallica:

“The (WMG) guys who are running this thing are looking at it pretty cynically. It's becoming more and more apparent that this is nothing more than a financial play for the investors. It's not about the music or the employees; it's about a return for private equity investors. It's kind of astounding when you sit back and look at the audacity.”

It’s hard for me to read this statement without thinking, “Duh.” The only thing about this that’s astounding to me is the naiveté being feigned by Paterno and Linkin Park. Of course this was a financial play. Private equity firms don’t buy companies so that they can hold them in their portfolios indefinitely and any lawyer or manager knows that. PE firms flip companies to make money for their investors, who, as often as not, are pension funds.

But, in fairness, this turned out to be an essentially riskless play for Bronfman and a team that included Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital and Providence Equity Partners, who paid Time Warner $2.6 billion for the unit. According to today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required)”

“Because the IPO raised less than the $574 million the company had promised in its SEC filings to allocate to debt reduction, the company is expected to reduce slightly a special dividend it plans to issue to its original investor group. Even before the IPO, though, the investors had been repaid the entire $1.25 billion [for the equity] they put up for the acquisition, thanks to an earlier series of dividends and other maneuvers.”

I know my MBA is showing here, so indulge me a bit further before we move on to what happened in today’s IPO. The ugly corporate realities of signing a major label have only been around for, oh, the lifetime of Linkin Park’s oldest fan. Signing with a major has long been known to be a deal with the devil and, in this case, it was a deal with a devil that had previously done a deal with another devil. I’m sure Linkin Park had its pick of independent labels to sign with, but it wanted a big bonus and a big marketing budget, so it landed with a major.

Now that the band has reaped the benefits of said label’s infrastructure, it has decided that it can go the way of Phish and the Grateful Dead, by, according to its press release, “relying more on touring, merchandising and endorsements, rather than leaving their future in the hands of a weakened WMG.”

The band notes that “new Fiona Apple music was released on the Internet for free and for years, bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish have performed new material live and let fans tape for free.”

Well, good luck to ‘em. Linkin Park obviously is more optimistic about its prospects than Warner is, so we’ll see who’s right.

Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, where Forbes.com’s Scott Reeves asks, “If the smart money wants out, do you want in?”

Reeves isn’t talking about Linkin Park (indeed, he never mentions the band’s dispute); he’s referring to the backers who cashing in on a company who’s year-over-year sales are down 9%.

While Warner Chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. predicted in 2000 that worldwide music sales would almost triple to $100 billion, instead they’ve fallen to a fraction of that year’s $38 billion figure.

Reeves implies that online piracy will continue to dampen Warner’s sales. That may be true, but the fact that none of the IPO’s proceeds will fund continuing operations hardly inspires optimism in Warner’s pipeline of new releases.

Regardless of what anyone thinks was wrong with this deal, it was clear that Wall Street shares Reeves’ pessimism. Shares were down 76 cents, or 4.5%, to $16.24 in afternoon trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.