The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

First off, Isiah definitely told Collins to go and foul someone hard. He saw his team being not just beaten but embarrassed and decided to do something about it. I'm not shocked, or less of a fan, or appalled by the fact that a fight broke out at a basketball game.

I am trying to decide who is the bigger bitch, Nate Robinson or Carmelo Anthony. I think it's Carmelo. Robinson stuck his neck in the fight and then tried to back out of it when those much bigger guys went at him. I, personally, would be on the top of the list to bitch out of a fight, but I'm also smart enough not to try and front like I want to fight when I really don't. Carmelo waited until the whole situation had calmed down and cooler heads were prevailing to circle around, throw a sucker punch at Collins, and then run away down the court like the fucking tooth fairy. No, I don't have any particular reason for saying tooth fairy, it certainly doesn't fit into the context or the analogy at all.

Interestingly, the working theory is that George Karl was definitely going out of his way to embarrass the Knicks because he's friends with Larry Brown. That, for me, is the most intriguing part of the story. The fight was just blah, but the fact that Karl was trying to make a statement for Larry Brown and it backfires on him and the league's leading scorer is missing 15 games at a time when their schedule is about to get really tough is quite something. I mean, he saw the game getting chippy, and Mardy Collins isn't even a garbage time player. If you're going to leave clowns in the game, at least take Carmelo out. That guy is your franchise, not your rub it in their face guy.

This is something I realized the other day in school. Most of my students wear Jordans. How they get the money for Jordans, I don't know, but that is beside the point at the moment. Anyhow, if you were a student in my high school and you were putting together an outfit for the day what you would need to do is pick a color scheme and go with it to a ridiculous extent. That is to say you match your shoes with your t-shirt, with your belt, with your headband, and probably also with your shoelaces. So you look like one color with a pair of jeans walking down the hallway. My kids tell me all the time that I don't match because I'm not wearing all one color and I try to explain to them the idea of contrasting colors and what not, but they just don't get it.

Anyhow, the phenomenon I realized the other day is that the Jordans now have like 3 or 4 colors in them. And amazingly the kids come to school wearing clothes with those 3 or 4 colors. The shirts match perfectly with the shoes, and the other accessories do as well. I satarted thinking about how the kids must be really good shoppers if they were going to these great lengths to find matching clothes and then I realized, no. In fact, the opposite is true. The people who make these clother are making them *to match with the Jordans*. There are these Jordans that you would all recognize from your youths, since all they're doing now is recycling the old Jordans, calling them retro styles, and charging $180 for them, that are mostly black, but have tinges of orange, yellow and red. And then I saw a kid with those Jordans on and a shirt that had black, yellow, orange, red, and white horizontal stripes. I thought the shirt was really busy and had an odd color combination and then looked at his shoes and realized that the shirt had exactly the same shades of yellow and orange as are in the shoes and the only possible explanation is that the shirt was designed to match those shoes.

In any event, I just think that's weird.