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I coach a lot of kids. I do it because I love watching them be successful. Tonight I watched my youngest shoot his first in-game basketball jump shot and it swished–nuthin but net. I loved that moment and immediately after his game I went to the other gym and watched a team my eldest will face at the end of the season. Seriously, those kids look like the Monstars and we don’t have Jordan. This got me thinking about coaching in general. I wanted to find a way to make practices go faster, get players more engaged, and help them get a lot better at their craft. Then I started to remember all of the times I tried to stick to a schedule of training my own kids and failed.

I have failed so many times at being consistent that it made me wonder why that happens so much and moreover, what the effect of that is on the kids. Call it the sponge effect. I picked up the habit of not following through from my mother and now my kids are picking it up from me. I’m focused on breaking the cycle and trying to figure out how to do that.

Culture is decided by the women.

Each day I find myself becoming more of a structural functionalist. The social theory, born in the thoughts of August Comte, suggests that all the parts of a society work together like an organism. What it therefore suggests is that extraneous parts can be detrimental, divisive, and even destructive. Now believing this to be true, I have always looked to figure out my place in that ‘organism’. Your job, role in family, role as a consumer, etc. defines your value in the macrosociological sense. Your financial contribution to the whole is the blood that pumps through the system.

Whenever I enter a new job, or consider my role in the family, community, etc. I do so from this perspective. What is my function in the overall mechanism and what then does my removal mean for that mechanism. This is, in a way, a high-falutent way of figuring out if I am valuable to people around me, which may seem egocentric but is necessary. The one commonality between biological systems and social ones is this: If you aren’t needed, you are dust.

The recent decision by the Food Network to remove Paula Deen from their network feels like the first left hook in a race war that should never happen. Deen, a buttery star of the network, was released from her association with the network due to allegations and testimony that shows she used racist statements at points in her life. This is far short from calling Deen a racist and someone who perpetuates hate. I choose to believe that she is neither of these things but instead is a woman born and raised in the south in a racist household, city, and state.

Deen admitted in testimony for a civil lawsuit that she used racial epitaphs such as ‘nigger’. She claimed to have used the language in direct relation to a man who held a gun to her head. Her comments suggest a woman who still sees ‘blacks’ as different; someone raised in a way that blacks were inherently a different group and one separate and perhaps inferior to herself. Now she also speaks to the fact that she evolved her viewpoint and doesn’t use that language and even goes so far to suggest her family won’t tolerate that language. This is evolution. This is what we want from people born into racism. So why is she being penalized for it?

What bothers me is that this could result in backlash. People could see this as a ‘why stop being racist’ moment and shift to a racist for life mode. After all, why try to change if there is no benefit to that change die to your past.

Some Thoughts:

1. The motivation isn’t there yet. On the bright side I did not go to McDonalds and buy the 6 apple pies I wanted. On an even brighter side I am starting to recognize that there are only so many distractions I can enjoy before my mind says enough.
2. Upon second viewing Prometheus has merit. The last 40 minutes are terrible, but everything up to that point is suspense filled and valid.

The big review should show up sometime next week in the Maricopan, so here is a 10 minute primer on what I expected, saw, and didn’t quite see. I expected Kate Beckinsale or another A-list star who folks would drool over as his wife. What I got was a woman who, while attractive in her own way, was there more for her Tony Award credentials than her supermodel credentials. What is important to recognize about World War Z is that it isn’t the kind of movie that will be emailed to the academy for screening. The film is meant to be a summer blockbuster and it delivers precisely what it is supposed to–to a point.

I expected to be underwhelmed by the zombies and by the action. I wasn’t. There were moments of shock and humor and general pleasure tittering throughout the crowd as the zombies got more screen time. That part of the movie delivered.

The parts that didn’t deliver? We’ll get to that on theMaricopan.com

Some Thoughts:

1. This lazy summer is incredibly rejuvenating and dangerous. I feel my working nature slipping further away…

2. I am running out of TV shows to watch!

3. I think monday marks the first time the kids will be on a real schedule. Hmm… maybe I ought to put myself on a schedule as well–at least a trial run for a week.

4. I’m not hot enough to be on one of these TV gameshows like 72 hrs. I need to change that, because I want to test myself in that arena.

In 2006 Congress based the Secure Fence Act, a bill that resonated with many as reminiscent of the Berlin Wall and perhaps even the Great Wall of China. In fact, the act did more than just provide funding and authority for an expansion of reinforced walls near the border and American population centers. It provided money for a study on the feasibility of such things–on the northern border.  As it turns out, that border is 3,987 miles of real estate as compared to a measly 1,933 on the south end. Given the length and cost of that border, it was clearly unfeasible to wall of that entire section of land. Besides, we only want to keep undesirables out, and undesirables don’t look like Canadians now do they?

The fact is the entire border security apparatus is, to a certain extent, an illusion. Walls and fences can no more keep a determined immigrant from entering our country than walls and fences can keep a determined criminal from entering your home. When your situation is bad enough, you will do anything to get out. Worst still, walls are symbolic gestures that tell those beyond the wall that they are not welcome. While some will tell you that walls suggest you are welcome if you come in the ‘right’ way, those same people fail to mention or perhaps even realize that the right way often doesn’t allow the people trying to come in to get in at all.

We, as a nation, don’t want immigrants from south of the border. This is not my personal opinion but a reflection of a shrinking majority viewpoint. The fear is twofold. On the one hand we are afraid that the incoming immigrants, unlike Canadians, will be unwilling to assimilate to our culture. The ‘us’ in that is the dominant caucasian American culture that created American government, American idealism, and strives to build these walls to exclude others. The second point of reasoning is the theory that those who come to our country do so for a free ride or to rob the ‘haves’. Of course there are those people. Heck, we have those people now and they are neither immigrants nor can they be categorized by race or former nationality. With all the good that trickles through the borders there will be the bad. However, with that bad comes a set of hard working and determined people who strive for nothing less than the American dream which so many of us here have either falsely achieved or abandoned in favor of easier goals, like being home in time to watch The Real Housewives of Orange County.

When thinking about immigrant perceptions I am constantly reminded of the divide between college and pro sports. Fans remind me that college athletes work harder, because they’re the have nots. They are the ones who are fighting for the chance to earn the professional roster spot and the big pay day. In this scenario we Americans are the pro  athletes who, fat on our big pay day, don’t play with the love and drive of the college athlete.

One guess to who the college athlete is in this scenario.

Once a year I fire up the old NBA 2K10 and continue the basketball franchise I’ve been working on since 09. In my magical bball world LeBron is a Bobcat (read: Hornet) and the Knicks are perennial playoff contenders. My world mirrors the real one in one sense: The playoffs are fantastic. The stars you expect to shine do so on occasion, but the real flash comes from former nobody’s who thrive on the matchups and the moment. In the real playoffs and the real finals those heroes have stories that don’t always end with a happy ending, but sometimes they emerge at just the right moment to remind the world of their value. On Tuesday we saw an old hero reemerge as a young one staggered. On Thursday I suspect we’ll get a bit more of the same.

Heat in 7.

Game six came down to the reemergence of Ray Allen and a guest appearance of LeBron James. I believe Allen is all the way back now and recognizing he is at the tail end of his career, he will put on the kind of show we basketball fans will remember for an extremely long time. Miami can lose. They can play with that sense of insecurity and timidness we’ve seen for games now. Or they can play like they love the game, love the opportunity, and realize there is no tomorrow. That is how they spent the last 20 seconds of game 6 and that is how they will spend the first 20 minutes of game 7.

The rest is a mystery to me…

I’m struggling with exercise again. Part of it is transitioning back into a routine and part of it is just plum laziness fortified by by a way too hot Arizona summer. I must admit I haven’t done much at all with this. I’ve spent my summer watching bad TV and not feeling terribly guilty about it. I think that’s okay too, because when August hits I have no choice but to work like a man possessed. The TV isn’t all that great anymore. For the nearly 200 I pay for  DirecTV  I expect a lot more. There are a few highlights. Oliver Stone’s Savages was a fun ride. TNT also delivered with a series of shows based on books written by pop culture literati like David Baldacci.

Not a whole lot more to say tonight about that. I suppose in reflection I have let my brain rot in the hot sun for way too long. Maybe I ought to challenge it a bit…

Some Thoughts:

1. LeBron James reminded me that if you don’t bring it all the time and get mired in what just happened, you’ll never be as great as you’re supposed to be. He sucked for most of Game 6 and only woke up at the very end.

Over the past few years I’ve become a student of game theory. The use of games as a learning tool in the college classroom has made the classes more engaging for me as an instructor and for the students as well. The class itself is a giant game show, with the winning team constituting the winners. Over the course of the last few days I’ve been thinking about a total revamp to the game theory, moving the game from just a group phenomenon to an individual test of skill as well.

The catalysts for this change are two shows: The Big Brain Theory and The Hero. While these shows are very different, they add useful elements to the evolution of my own game design. Big Brain operates as an elimination show where the teams are not static. Each week new captains are chosen based on individual performance and those captains get to choose teams for the weekly challenge. In the Hero there is only one team and together that team decides which members go forward to complete certain challenges. Now I can see ways to use these two strategies together in the first three weeks of class in what I will call a ‘Draft Camp’ Each day will present a new challenge and at the beginning of each period 5-6 captains will be chosen to come forward and select team members. By the end of that period I will have solid draft rankings for each students providing me with an assessment of their individual skills in a number of ‘control’ areas.

The downside of this new strategy is that there is going to be people on the bottom. I can limit this by selecting tiers. You can draft as a tier 1, 2, 3, 4 (Rounds?) selection and each team must select a member from each tier. Still, starting a class where you are labeled as a bottom tier student is as likely to reinforce student apathy as it is to force that student off their butt to work. It is a risk I am willing to take. I am also ready to do the work needed to help that student figure out how to be a successful student. That is where The Hero comes in. In this show challenges may only be completed by certain people based on who did previous challenges. If I modify that to indicate that individual challenges can only be completed by certain tiers, this will most certainly force groups to ensure that lower tiered players are much more than dead weight.

I think the biggest change may come in the trades. This is a game for points after all, and attaching point values to tiers (Lower tier = higher point compensation needed) will really lead to some critical thinking about how to pick teams and how to add or remove members of a team. What is a member worth to you? I’m excited to find that out.

Now all I need to do is find a way to make it simple.

I’m trying to become a home improvement expert–the kind of guy who can build a loft, change a tire, and cook a meal all in a day’s work. I’m city. In fact, I’m inner city which means my familiarity with repair and design is tied to my familiarity with a phone. I call for what I want and it gets done. Here in the desert suburbs that too is an option, but you are supposed to be able to do a certain amount of building and repairing yourself. Presently, I have no talent in doing such things, but I feel like I am a work in progress.

Tomorrow I will further that progress by starting to lay out a plan for making my backyard work for my family. My middle kid is really into construction right now (he wants to build a drawbridge), so he and I may make an outdoor treehouse, a retaining wall, maybe even some sort of cool water feature!

Some Thoughts:

1. Handful of home improvement goals left for 2013 including making the yard into my dream oasis, finishing the kids bedroom design, and the office. The last project is important because that is where the magic happens in 2014.
2. The utter lack of foul calls in Game 5 of the NBA finals showcased home court advantage. Lebron James was relentlessly fouled on drives to the basket yet went to the freethrow line only a couple of times.
3. Speaking of basketball, the kids’ seasons start in 6 days. I still need to teach them how to shoot!
4. Starting a new morning routine where we get up by 7 and work on athleticism for a bit before the day starts. That means I need to sleep a bit earlier.