Month: August 2016

Colin Kaepernick not standing for the national anthem is not a story. Period. One man’s choice to exercise his freedom of speech shouldn’t be treated like national news. Honestly, it is not that big of a deal. He’s making a statement. Let him. Hell, defend him because that flag and that song and the piece of parchment they represent grant him the power to do so.

Moving on…

Well, not entirely. Stop acting like the national anthem is entirely about supporting our military. This is something that becomes convenient in times of war–especially in the days and years following 9/11. When they play it at the olympics it isn’t about our soldiers alone. No, that song is about one nation, supposedly indivisible with supposed liberty and justice for all. Yep, all of that is debatable given the history of our nation and the terrible conditions for some classes of people (who were not deemed human at multiple points throughout history to provide a convenient lawyerly workaround) not too long ago.

Really moving on…

This political nonsense is eating valuable football talk time. Getting back to that I ought to reveal that I had my first of two fantasy drafts this year and I am surprised by the results. Even in a PPR league there is a lot of speculation that RBs are the prize. My second league is not PPR and I am starting to think I need to refocus my attention on a thin crowd of backs. Who to pick? The safe bets are predicated by experienced lines and softball schedules. AP only has three weeks where he is not guaranteed 100 yds+. He makes the top of the list, with some speculation about the Tennessee backs to follow. They both looked amazing during pre-season, mostly because of a line that blows folks up. Still they both looked great, which is not great for fantasy.

More to come. I waxed political too long and am out of time, so maybe tomorrow with some picks.

I’m taken aback by the power of Spotlight.

The team and it’s stories, featured in the Spotlight film, is a real thing. I recently visited their website and was very impressed with their ability to tell relevant stories in a world that seems more obsessed with stories that have little lasting significance than stories–real human stories–that have lasting impact. The Spotlight film focuses on the paper’s exposure of sex abuses in the Catholic Church. Over the last 10 years the story has been largely forgotten, but there was a scandal–a rash of priests abusing minors–that stretched upwards to the Vatican. It is easier to shut our ears and eyes to the important stories than it is to actually accept that things happen. Accepting the reality of such things means that we either act or live with the fact that we did not act.

Neither is easy and that is why news is often so very shallow and meaningless.

That brings me back to Spotlight. They continue to tell the difficult stories and inspire me to do the same. I’ve been working on a plan to do so. I am moving towards an academic space where I can help students tell the tough stories–tell their stories. My focus this semester is on students asking questions and digging deeper, looking for the truth beyond the obvious and the cover up and the easy.

I’m borrowing this concept from NFL.com which uses it to reflect on a slate of games. I teach instead of play, so I will reflect on a slate of classes for 10 minutes or so.

ENG 091 ONLINE
The idea of teaching dev english online has met with a great deal of resistance. The overwhelming opinion of the detractors is that dev students are not equipped to deal with learning from an online environment. This is the result of a great deal of speculation and assumption about the dev community. Many educators come to this opinion through experience. Some don’t. For me it isn’t as black and white as the level may indicate. After all, being selected to be in a dev class means you earned a certain score on a writing test. It says nothing about your life outside of that page.

That being said, I have three students who never even logged in this week. They weren’t built for this and it showed. Others run the standard gamut of dev learning, with some ‘in for’ grammar issues and other lacking basic principles of ENG learning. Too soon to know how this is going to go.

ENG 091 F2F

Same as above in terms of diversity, but I can say these kids are going to need to be eased into the learning because they are throwing some serious shade on the language and its essays. There was talk about writing having little to no value and that doesn’t fly with me.

ENG 102

I’m happiest here this semester because I dove right in and got started. One class is already on the first movie of the semester and the others may catch up this week. Once that is over we are reading Killing Pablo and starting to think about what it really means to write about research or to research itself.

Some Thoughts:

1. Only have time to cover classes and not the writer’s life (or the novel writer’s class) before the time hits 0 and still drop thoughts.
2. Here’s a thought: I love writing.
3. I love a certain lady too.

This looks to be one of those early nights. You know the ones where you crawl up in bed with a good book and a glass of wine or Netflix and chill (without the silly sexual connotation). I’m drained from a long day of football and feeling the effects of a longer week of school. This week was full of ups and downs with the low point unfurling itself on the field of the JPW game early this afternoon. The coach forfeited rather than risk any other players getting injured by a team that was clearly winning. He blamed lack of protection, which he later attributed to bad referee work and poor execution by his offensive linemen. This, obviously, did not go over well with players or parents. It set a negative tone for the season and made it seem as though quitting is actually okay.

It isn’t.

I’ve been reminded to take a step back and see this in the greater scheme of things. Yeah, this isn’t going to cause the planet to spin off its axis (though according to the butterfly effect theory it might), but it did undermine what I’ve been teaching as a parent. That is never a good thing.

In other news I am ready to get back to writing as soon as I can. This is a good moment for me, and I hope to grow very soon and very quickly.

Tonight marks the end of the first week of classes and the beginning of what looks to be a hectic fall of sports. I gotta admit I’m not terribly excited about all of it. One night ago I was researching the team my team is going to face and short of figuring out a bit about who they actually are, it didn’t do much for me. I should have been writing. That is quickly becoming a mantra–one I believe I ought to repeat until I no longer need to. Until I should have been writing morphs into I should’ve written even more.

Priorities have shifted for me in my old age. I received Madden 17 in the mail on Thursday and have played less than an hour of the game since I unpacked it. That time went to various chores and audiobooks, proving the game to be lower in the hierarchy of my attentions than it had been in previous iterations. I have not even played enough to give a good feedback blog about it.

So that is how things are now. I’m looking for time and space to be a better writer and teacher and my kids are playing the role of antagonist by merely being adorable and wanting me to hang out with them. Fortunately they can get over competitive and grouchy and scream at each other, reminding me of the reality of having them.

Or at least having them when you’re trying to get your crap done.

I googled the term Reality Tuning because I was expecting it to already be a thing. It isn’t and that vexes me. In this era of unparalleled access to the world, I would expect someone would have come up with the term already. Nope. To me the term represents the tendency of individuals to limit their informational access to a specified subset of information that conforms with the world/worldview they wish to exist in. We have so many options and so many screens of data and so many avenues of escape that it is in fact possible to tune your reality to whatever you like.

Some Thoughts:

1. I learned something from this recent political campaign. There are two sets of rules. One set belongs to people who are presumed to be fair and just. The other is for the people who are presumed to be, for lack of a better word, corporate. We all know Trump is an ass, so there aren’t any real surprises when the dude acts as he does. On the other hand, Clinton is held to a far higher standard. These standards are so high that Trump can honestly complain when she says anything to disparage him or to reflect his behaviors. I suppose it isn’t new information but a reinforcement of what I’ve believed all along.
2. I haven’t played Minecraft in weeks. I miss the crafting and the associated meditations.
3. Mr. Robot season 2 is a hero’s journey.

 

Even Jay-Z is drinking the juice. On Khalid’s Major Key album he raps, ‘I perform like Josh Norman; I ain’t normal’ which is possibly more prophetic than he realizes. See, Jay-Z works really well within a certain BPM range and cadence. Within that range he is seen as one of the best–largely because the best are older or straight up out of the game. So we are left with Jay-Z to be the Scion of a budding generation. So too can be said of Norman, but there are other things to be said and other questions still unanswered, enough so that I am extremely suspicious of his ability to be the lockdown player he was professed to be in Carolina.

Here is a question: If Norman is Revis good, then why release him? I get not wanting to pay a player what they believe they are worth–heck the Jets traded Revis–but to let him go without getting anything in exchange points to a larger issue. A Nick Foles-sized issue. Remember Foles? Pro-Bowl offensive MVP Foles who had a ridiculously good season with the Eagles before the world (save for the Rams) realized he was a straight up fluke? That happened. Then the Rams released him and now he is a backup for the Chiefs.

This happens a lot. The media hypes up a player and they turn out to be less-than. I’ve watched the tape. Sorry, Jay-Z. Norman is normal. So are you, BTW.

Earlier today I posted a fairly cryptic facebook message. I said, in sum, that I finally understand the difference between religion and science. It goes like this: Science is about the How. Religion is about the Why. Science tells us to ask the difficult questions about how a thing works, how the universe started and how many times reality has been formed (probably 8) and how it all works. Religion is primarily concerned with why we are here, what our purpose is, and why we are meant to behave in a certain fashion. Religion largely leaves the question of how up to God and Faith.

God made the world. How? Seven days of complex hand movements I suppose. But none of that matters. He did it, we know it, and you ought to move right along. Science responds, ‘Not so fast, my friend. Even if God made the world, it used the complex physics of space time in order to do so, therefore we ought to try and understand how those work in order to gain a better understanding of our reality.’

So there you have the insane collaboration of how and why, which truly ought to be a collaboration and really was at some points in our history. Nowadays we are largely reduced to caricatures and stereotypes to group together large swaths of understanding and separate them from each other in a binary fashion. You are 0 or 1, but never both it seems and if both you are outcast.

Wait, my saddle is making me itch. Let me climb down off this high horse…

Some Thoughts:

1. Forza 6 is visually stunning and I am hooked. Race Night 2 coming this Saturday.
2. I remain thoroughly and utterly in love.
3. No, it isn’t a blonde. That was a typo.

A few short days from the first game of the new football season I find myself in the midsts of a very funny joke. It goes like this: The team my team plays has little batman logos on their helmets. In practice they wear the batman Under Armour gear. My team has a longstanding relationship with the idea of Superman and last fall wore Superman shirts specially modded to reflect our team logo. So, what you have happening Saturday is:

 

That’s what’s up.

Unless these kids come up with some Kryptonite quick, its going to end quite differently than the film.

In other news, that commercial with Jon Snow driving a Q60 coupe feels a heck of a lot like it feels to play Forza 6–for the next day or so until Madden arrives. We are going to do Racing night 2.0 soon in order to get into the Fast and Furious series.

So in short, it is taking a long time to hack out these handful of words and I’m tired and slowly adjusting to the revived work schedule. It will be a few days before the blonde gets back to normal.

Watching the Olympics I was struck by one strange fact. An overwhelming majority of the athletes were black. It seemed as if any country that could have access to black athletes did and did so in surprising numbers. Or is it a surprise at all? I am not going to be making the case that black people are genetically superior athletes. There is a case to be made for that in the USA as my people were specifically bred for labor. The issue here is one of socialization I think. Statistically speaking, blacks live at lower income levels that non-blacks almost everywhere on the globe. This is especially true in areas like South Africa where laws were created to preserve a social imbalance in order to keep the money in the pockets of those who already had it.

Which brings me to my point: Black athletes are in and lately dominate Olympic sports because of the poor conditions in which they were raised. In other words, athletics provided a way out and many seized upon that opportunity.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t think I did a great job explaining the imbalance here, but I don’t have the time to go back and fix it. I’ll explain it: Need + Desire + Goals = maximum output. The need factor of the equation is what I try to work on…