The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Remember that time I said I would blog about that thing I was gonna do it I ever did it? Well, today I did it, so I'm blogging about it. If you can't keep a promise to yourself, then whom can you keep one to?

So me and Chris and Luke and Brian decided that we all enjoy blogging, but that none of us blog enough alone for it to amount to much of anything. So we started a group blog where each of us can contribute posts. I don't know if there are guidelines for posts, or if you just post whatever you want, but I assume we'll figure it out.

wheres-luke.blogspot.com is where the magic is happening. Maybe soon we'll be like...I was gonna try to be cool and cite a well read group blog, but I can't think of any. I suck. In fact, I can't think of any blogs with the exception of Joe's and Max's that even gets updated with any frequency.

Well, read that blog. I can't really say if I'll stop posting here altogether or what. But it's not as if I post here much anyway. For the past few months I've been making myself do at least one post a month, so maybe other fools posting will spur me on a bit.

Ok, I realize that the Knicks are pretty bad and that they are ot going to make the playoffs this year. But I do have hope for the Knicks to improve this year and also the next. The reason: Eddy Curry is unstoppable.

There have been two bright spots for the Knicks this year in an otherwise mediocre to ppor season. First is that David Lee is incredible. If you are a Knick fan then I don't see how your favorite player could be anyone other than David Lee. He really is just fantastic. He brings energy and efficiency to the Knicks in a way that no one has in a long time. Lee really reminds me of Charles Oakley in the way that he just does all the dirty work for the team. He is, amazingly, flashier than Oakley, and does not hit the 18 foot jump shot like Oakley would, but otherwise they play very similar games. I say amazingly because Lee is not really flashy at all, but Oakley was about as far from flashy as is possible.

The second bright spot for the Knicks this year is Eddy Curry. To say that he's turned the corner this season would be a huge understatement. I watch a lot of Knicks games, far more than their play warrants, and I've really seen the transformation from Eddy Curry. When he gets the ball in the post and he is not double teamed, he is literally unstoppable in recent days. He a huge man, but he's surprisingly athletic and quick. He can dribble around the big guys, body up the small guys, and really is just a handful to deal with if you're defending him. He's alwawys had that capability, but this season he really is playing with a confidence that has boosted his game immensely. It might be an overstatement, but I think he's the most underrated offensive player in the league. He throws down alley oop passes better than anyone this side of Dwight Howard and is better than anyone I can ever recall with his back to the basket.

Now this improvement is really tempered by his lackluster play in all other areas. Curry averages something like 6 rebounds, when really he should average a triple double. His defense is disgusting, which is surprising given his quickness. And even though he's gotten far fewer offensive fouls this year versus last, he still has a lot. So Eddy's got room for improvement, but he's gone from someone who's pure potential and disappointment to someone who's really starting to shine, at least on offense.

The Knicks have guys who would be nice players on other teams, but are not good enough together to get things done. On the top of that list is Quenstin Richardson, who really does everything at an above average level without really being a star. Jamal Crawford tries hard and has talent, but is too inconsistent to really be a threat. He'll score 52 on one night and then go 3 for 12 on the next. He really just puts in some Starksian efforts from time to time. Channing Frye has a great jump shot, but does live up to his potential as a soft player. Jared Jeffries is serviceable, but obviously overpaid, like all the Knicks are. Malik Rose is a good character guy, but can't do what he used to in terms of defense and hustle. Renaldo Balkman is pure energy and no focus at this point. He might be a David Lee Lite type of guy eventually.

Their other guys just detract from the team, in my opinion. Nate Robinson is just a novelty act. He is a 5'9" shooting guard. He doesn't have point guard skills and just plays stupidly a lot of the time. Jerome James is the epitome of overpaid and underskilled. Marbury is a net zero I think. He rarely shines since they've been focusing on Curry and has been playing hard, and I guess that's all we can ask from him at this point.

Note that I'm writing this on super Bowl Sunday, hours before the game is to take place. I don't know the outcome yet, obviously, but I find myself a bit flummoxed by all of the analysts out there in the world.

I am routing for the Colts. I like Manning and Dungy and Harrison and I like the way they play the game and I think I mentioned all this in a previous post. That being said, I really think the Bears are going to win. The Bears have a very good defense and that fact inconjunction with Manning's less than stellar performance thus far in the playoffs, including 2 TD passes to go along with 6 interceptions, says to me that the Bears are capable of shutting down the Indy offense. On top of that the Bears offense, while not spectacular by any stretch, seems to match up well against the Indy defense. The Bears are going to look to run the ball all day and just let Rex Grossman manage the game and perhaps make one or two plays through the course of the game.

If these particular matchups that I just mentioned go in the Bears favor, then there is no way they won't win. That's not to say that the Bears are definitely going to win, or that the Colts aren't capable of putting up a lot of points and playing very good defense, as they have in all 3 of their playoff games so far, but I think the Bears should be favored.

I have not seen one analyst who has picked the Bears. Not a single one with the exception of Mike Ditka, who is clearly biased in choosing them. I can see why an analyst would choose the Colts to win given the fact that they seem to playing good defense and if everyone plays at their best the Indy offense is really unstoppable. At the same time, however, I would expect that just as many people would choose the Bears for the reasons I mentioned earlier. The Bears were the number 1 seed from the start of the season. The Bears defense has had one of the best years of all time. Their running game is solid, and they have a real deep threat with Bernard Berrian. The only reason, it seems, that analysts are not picking the Bears is because of Rex Grossman.

Grossman is definitely inconsistent, and is hardly up to the caliber of Peyton Manning, but he is not incapable of having a good game. For all of the bad games he had this year, 6 by all accounts of the worst games ever by a starting QB, he had 10 very good games with a very high passer rating. He's not incapable, he just makes really bad decisions from time to time. Assuming he does not do that (and perhaps that's a ppor assumption) the Bears have what it takes to win on offense, defense, and special teams.

My point is this; I think the Bears are going to win, even though I'm routing for the Colts. I don't see how not even one analyst is picking the Bears as I would expect it to be about a 50/50 proposition. I wrote this before the game intentionally just so my opinion would be out there no matter what happens.

Whether your view is that it actually runs "all the news that's fit to print" or that it's got a tradition of slanting and omitting just enough to let out its liberal bias, I assume you have at least a modicum of respect for the New York Times as a respectable newspaper. And when taken in conjunction with the more conservative leaning papers, say the Wall Street Journal, you can essentially get an informed view of the world. So let's take that as a given. Here are a couple of reflections I have on the New York Times after having at least leafed through it every day for a couple years now.

The first and strangest thing about the New York Times is that they will always, and I mean always, opt to put the absolute most depressing picture possible on the front cover. Recently they've had pictures from Iraq and such with things being blown up or some sort of terror happening. If at all possible they will print a photo of an Arab looking guy hovering over one or more dead bodies after some type of insurgency or other attack. This is disturbing to me. If they have no other choice then they'll just put some other type of picture. Just this week, for example, they ran a photo of Dubya giving the state of the union address with Big Time Cheney and Madame Speaker behind him. But the day before that and the day after, depression.

The second thing is that the crossword gets inordinately hard starting with Thursday. I can usually finish Monday through Wednesday with little trouble and then on Thursday I can't even get it started. From time to time on Thursday I'll get a couple of the clues and actually get through a good portion of it, but Friday Saturday Sunday I don't even attempt. I feel like in order to be able to get good at the later in the week puzzles you have to look at the solution the next day and get familiar with the clues and the answers. That's just way more work than I'm willing to put in. Also sometimes they have gimmick puzzles where you have to put several letters in one square and I never get those.

The sports section is very biased to the Yankees. They almost always put a picture of the Yankee game on the front page instead of the Mets. And a lot of times the lead article will be about the Mets, but the picture in the inset is from the Yankee game. It's mad weird.

Maureen Dowd is no longer clever, she's just really self aware. And as Sara Silverman said in this weeks New York Times Magazine, "deconstruction is a comedy killer."

The Science Times rules.

My friend Wallace brought this up today and I thought it was a great point so I told him I was goig to steal his idea and blog about it.

What sort of psychological mechanism leads us to watch movies on TV that we already own on DVD? Literally whenever I feel like it I can watch a movie that I have on DVD in the original widescreen format, with superior picture quality on my HDTV and with no commercials. Instead, and I know this happens to everyone, I find myself flipping around watching TNT and they're playing, I don't know, say Goodfellas or The Princess Bride or something like that, and I just watch the whole thing, commercials and all. What's up with that?

First of all, since the Bears are in the Super Bowl, it's a great excuse to re-watch the "Super Bowl Shuffle" from the 1985 Chicago Bears. Not only kickin' it mad old school, but also really poorly.



Anyway, my thoughts about the Super Bowl are that I'm really glad the Colts make it. I enjoy watching the Colts and I like Peyton Manning and I feel like he deserves to win. I also like the way all the Colts carry themselves starting with Tony Dungy and going on down. So I'm glad that a classy organization gets that recognition.

I was pretty indifferent about the Bears and the Saints. I guess I wanted the Saints to win, but if the Giants weren't going to win the NFC, then it really didn't matter.

My other thought is that I'm glad the Patriots lost, I really think they deserved it. They had all the talent in the world and guys who fit perfectly into their systems and they treated them like crap. They coach these guys up and then when it's time to pay them for being great players, they refuse to. The one exception obviously is Tom Brady, but he's a one in a million quarterback so they're at least smart enough to keep him. In the past 4 to 5 years they have lost star players like Lawyer Milloy, Ty Law, Deion Branch, and others because they weren't willing to pay them market value. They manage their salary cap to a Draconian extent. They had Deion Branch ranked as their best offensive player coming into this season. Better even than Tom Brady and they kicked him out the door rather than pay him market value. So they deserve to lose because they think they can win on their system with no talent.

On top of that Bill Belichick is a fucking jerk. He acts like a 4 year old. I mean, there are guys who have reputations as ornery guys, like Bobby Knight for example, but those guys at least act like human beings. Belichick just looks like he wants to take his ball and go home whenever shit doesn't go his way. Even when they're winning he treats other guys like dicks. The whole ridiculous debacle with Eric Mangini, for example. Or the interview he gave to Solomon Wilcox last night which was just silly.

I think the Colts are going to win. I'm routing for the Colts rather than just be indifferent, which is what I usually am. I can't see Rex Grossman leading his team to victory, and, all else being equal, the quarterback comparison is not even close. I'm not saying it will be a blowout, but I think the Colts will pull it out.

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.